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Bi2Z797° .N6 1925 
Northwestern University 

(Evanston, I11.) 
Immanuel Kant 





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IMMANUEL KANT 


1724-1924 





SILHOUETTE BY HEINRICH WOLFF 


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PAPERS READ 
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BICENTENARY 
OF 
KANT’S BIRTH 


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CONTENTS: 


PAGE 
Frontispiece. Silhouette by Heinrich Wolff. 
DNITRODUGLORY sm NOTES LCWatGs lu. a SChaubimaeits cctarctotin cle aldbie dele teieee Or, tareelamrnle nerds «s i 
PROGRAM AOFM NORTH WESTERN «| UNIVERSITY. CELEBRATION. 6 c.s.ofo siccoo che cues 0 ehero.sc1e.0,s.sus 0 « il 
- Tue Lecacy or Kant. 
DW eA De ean GEA Dia wupaaaien aed here co sel aOR sce etree arteitee coe teite tees 1 
Tur NeEEp ANp Possrpruity oF AN Imperativistic Eruics. 

Com Vie ELA RD Ghee tetercry pe stat cin o eztte ae Tatars lel abi erere crated o etait ieleitte Rete oe ctccens 25 
THe CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT. 

VAR PEN SCH UZ Beene ee Se eee ee Sees eee LR RAG Po ee) cs 45 
KANT, THE SEMINAL THINKER. 

TOSERPHVAGILETGEH LO Nap. sertteira cere a erehstae ie tite oe ett ace stots, wich 7A 
Tue RELIGION OF IMMANUEL KANT. 

MD VWeAR Die SGRIBINE RegAIMiITGS Sipe erer fetter eer ortitcccioe sans charaod choPucyoun «coe ¢ 91 
Kant AS A STUDENT OF NATURAL SCIENCE. 

re VAT Ll Nae cies nes OA yee aro RNR ER ei es HORS ea Sao apa ne ate AU 101 
Kant’s PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. 

BES MCPO RS EV al totais cs cergie ce eer LLG Gurl dt cre oe aue a Palais. ae: Oe wen tae oe 115 
Kanvt’s Puitosopuy or Law. 

MORE NE MEATIN cha < cectn re Waele ce ee ere Nee cee ne ee mee ees alee 139 
Kant’s DoctrInE CoNCERNING PERPETUAL PEACE. 

ee PEPE O RD) 0 Ea eis ce ve 5 oles DDO PALES Cats DRT. GERMAN. Ss 157 
THE Sources AND EFFECTS IN ENGLAND OF KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF BEAUTY. 

TE TP CARR RUCARG Bi hy SR es anand ee TTR Pole SON TORONT. Ps MRSS Scene Per heey oma Se 179 


Kant’s CopERNICAN REVOLUTION. 
LED BO CU SUTSS 4S Se HO DA Ee OS al ON Se bo ia AS OS ci ae A 195 


INTRODUCTORY NOTE 


THE PAPERS that follow were originally prepared with a view to 
the specific needs of the various sessions of the bicentenary com- 
memoration of Kant held at Northwestern University on December 
4 and 5, 1924. They were not written for technical students of 
philosophy nor, in most cases at least, with a thought of publication 
either separately or as a collection. The controlling factor in the 
formulation of the program, moreover, was not the aim of present- 
ing a delicately balanced account of all the elements and phases of 
Kant’s complex philosophy; it was primarily that of paying tribute 
to a commanding intellectual figure in such a way that classes in 
philosophy and groups of other students and the interested public 
might receive illuminating introduction to his personality and thought 
and a fresh stimulus to, and an enhanced appreciation of philosophic 
study. It was in response to numerous requests from individuals 
attending the celebration and with the hope that the addresses might 
prove of wider interest and value that the publication of the collec- 
tion as a whole was decided upon. In three instances, as may be 
noted, writers have preferred to modify somewhat the titles of their 
papers, but in no case has the content been substantially altered. 

On the whole it has seemed preferable to present the papers ac- 
cording to the order of the printed program. The latter we 
annex hereto in order to give some idea of the character of the cele- 
bration and of the specific occasions for which the various papers 
were designed. 


Epwarp L. ScHAUB. 


PROGRAM 


The general public will be cordially welcomed at all meetings marked by a 
star. Attention is also invited to an exhibit of portraits, books and other mate- 
rials assembled for the commemoration in Harris Hall 107. 


THurspDAY, DECEMBER 4 : 
ESR ENA Sect tearm er CEN ats aa ce DC alae wos Se wm Aw ete University Club 


SNE cr Ween eee ett Ate act 5 cee ake sce tee «vee cd Harris Hall 107 
The Legacy of Kant (Opening Address) 
Edward L. Schaub, Northwestern University 
Philosophical Modernism and the Kantian Ethics 
G. T. W. Patrick, The State University of Iowa 
IN ee Seer each Peasy becae este boa wait bie cake, ws 629 Garrett Place 
Discussion Circle, preceding dinner at the home of 
Edward L. Schaub 
ee MRM AMR arate Nant sats aca: aap; std ater e > bb Syke en OO onto oath Harris Hall 107 
Quariette for Strings, Opus 18, No. 1............. Beethoven 
String Quartette from the School of Music, 
Northwestern University 
The Literary and Social Environment of Kant 
Martin Schuetze, The University of Chicago 
Kant, The Seminal Thinker 
J. A. Leighton, State University of Ohio 
Fripay, DECEMBER 5 
PAM): ALi ML. > og sceie tee TERN cee winds cre s slew c Sy os Gee cele h ss Chapel, Fisk Hall 
The Religion of Kant 
E. S. Ames, The University of Chicago 
See DEM cynics eh mee CE otter eee eee a erik vlekutin deh cbse ex's Harris Hall 107 
Kaxt as a Student of Natural Science 
S. G. Martin, Northwestern University 
Kant’s Philosophy of Religion 
J. H. Farley, Lawrence College 
RE UD Ses es, 27s ale vive ss «ay Cabs vs SAS EON hee cualir Harris Hall 107 
Kant’s Philosophy of Law 
E. L. Hinman, The University of Nebraska 
Me ESA 1S Fi 2s aie) «cies cio a 0! wre, sone aie ¥iejdi anon sce een ee University Club 


AM ag cela. nha sea coe e ee ee oo eee Bene Harris Hall 107 
Kant’s Doctrines Concerning Perpetual Peace 
J. F. Crawford, Beloit College 
Sources and Influence of Kant’s Aesthetic Theory in England 
E. F. Carritt, Oxford University 
Sey MRIs tte ac cccislarcieie sip Gisiess overs, ccc dies or oes e wale Harris Hall, Social Room 
Reception and Tea given by the University Guild for visiting 
guests and members of the faculty of 
Northwestern University 
ee PN ees on ao oS uci gee ee ciew ls Gao ae bran diol & MEd Wo ow es University Club 


RE MINES aI Se eve Te cieretere since eine wisiae eae eleinoee ome aie eat Harris Hall 107 
Kant and Koenigsberg (Illustrated lecture) 
E. L. Hinman, The University of Nebraska 
Kant’s Copernican Revolution 
Frank Thilly, Cornell University 


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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


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PEE SCEGACY LOPAKANT 


T IS altogether fitting that we break sufficiently from 
our accustomed round of lectures and other college 
activities to unite, during these days, in commemorating 
the life and work of Immanuel Kant. Born two hundred 
years ago, he lived all of his eighty years in, or in close 
proximity to, his native city, Koenigsberg, in far remote 
East Prussia. His attachment to this spot, moreover, was 
one of sentiment, not of necessity. Here he felt himself in 
the deepest sense at home. Persistently, therefore, he de- 
clined to leave even under the lure of positions of greater 
prominence and immediate influence. His language incor- 
porates provincialisms and his thought is deeply marked by 
the spirit of his land as well as of his age. Constant strug- 
eles with a step-motherly nature had developed in the peo- 
ple of that bleak Baltic country hardiness, rugged simplic- 
ity, systematic and sustained effort, self-reliance and inde- 
pendence, and a discipline and self-denial that yielded but 
little to the pressure of clamorous desires or to the blan- 
dishments of pleasure. Reason and will, organization and 
decisiveness,—these were traits of potency, strictly sub- 
ordinating to themselves the claims of passing experience 
and of fugitive impulse. This set of values, so deeply 
grounded in the conditions under which life was carried 
on and so thoroughly validated by its successes and fail- 
ures, determined much in the way both of the form and of 
the substance of Kant’s philosophical writings. More 
particularly is this true of the ethical works. The latter 


2 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


might even be described as an analysis and defense of the 
values mentioned, and therefore also of Kant’s people. 
True as all this is, it should nevertheless not be overlooked 
that the supremacy of these values has by no means been 
restricted to one time and place. On the contrary, it has 
been acknowledged by many who must be counted among 
the wisest and best of all ages and climes. Furthermore, 
Kant’s deepest concern was the discovery and validation 
of truth. Alike in his central endowments and by choice 
he was a philosopher, and thus a thoughtful and vitally 
concerned spectator of all time and existence. By virtue 
of extraordinarily keen analytic powers, firm intellectual 
grasp and rare catholicity of interests, he so wrought that 
vital influences have radiated from him upon subsequent 
thought and practice throughout the entire civilized world. 
Thus, he effectually transcended all narrow limits of space 
and time and became identified with mankind as a whole. 

Tn our own land, commemorations of Kant have hitherto 
not been common. Elsewhere, however, the situation has 
been quite otherwise. Not only in Koenigsberg but in all 
thirty-five centers where there are local branches of the 
Kantgesellschaft, and in numerous other localities, every 
recurrence of Kant’s natal day is an occasion when tribute 
is paid to him, and when his methods and conclusions are 
very especially and explicitly put to the test of current 
problems. Special anniversaries, such as the centenary of 
the Critique of Pure Reason and that of Kant’s death, have 
been observed even more widely and elaborately. Great 
has been the importance of these commemorations—wit- 
ness merely that it was as a contribution to the former that 
Hans Vaihinger published his important commentary on 
Kant and that Max Miiller completed his well-nigh indis- 
pensable translation of the Critique into English. These 
earlier celebrations, however, have been quite over- 
shadowed by those held during the present year. In as 


THE LEGACY OF KANT %' 


many as fourteen different countries, commemorations of 
one form or another have in recent months been held. 
Numerous monographs and detailed studies, commemora- 
tive volumes and Festschrifte, have appeared, and transla- 
tions, such as that of the Prolegomena into Roumanian. 
Philosophical journals, in France as elsewhere, have de- 
voted special numbers or sections to appraisals or attempts 
at the further development of the Kantian doctrines. Reichls 
Philosophischer Almanach for 1924 is dedicated to the 
memory of Kant and contains considerable material, hith- 
erto somewhat inaccessible, on the characteristics of his 
personality and thought. The International Congress of 
Philosophy which convened in Naples during the early part 
of May included as a special feature an address commemo- 
rating Kant. Thus, as respects both their number and 
their importance, the celebrations called forth by the bicen- 
tenary of Kant’s birth have been exceptional. And is it 
not indeed more appropriate, particularly in the case of a 
great philosopher like Kant, to single out for especial com- 
memoration the anniversary of the birth in preference to 
that of the death? Is not the life of Kant, as of every great 
philosopher, represented in a peculiar sense and measure 
by and in his thought? Must we not then say that where- 
ever this is potent and so long as it remains vital there and 
then do we find present and living the spirit whom we 
wish to honor ? 

When our program was arranged my topic was set down 
as “The Legacy of Kant.” At the time, this gave promise 
of affording an altogether satisfactory caption for such 
general remarks as might be appropriate in opening our 
celebration. But the wording of the title is after all not 
an altogether happy one. In the case of Kant, philosophi- 
cal endeavor expressed primarily a passion for truth. 
Herein, and not in an impelling desire to leave a bequest, 
must one find his central motivation. In his earlier years, 


4 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


he was an intellectual aristocrat. The crowning glory 
of man he found in the pursuit of pure science and of phil- 
osophy. This Hellenic outlook, to be sure, was abandoned 
after 1762 when, under the influence of Rousseau—whose 
picture was the only one to hang in Kant’s study during 
all of his years in the Prinzessinstrasse—he learned, as he 
put it, to “honor men” and to see that he would be less 
useful than the common laborer unless he dedicated all his 
powers “to restore the rights of man.” Nevertheless 
Kant even thereafter stands out in sharpest contrast with 
those who, like so many today, pursue and justify philoso- 
phy essentially, if not exclusively, as an agency for social 
reform. Neither as to problem nor as to method could 
this be the objective of the critical or the transcendental 
philosophy. 

But it was primarily the queries which arose a moment 
ago that suggested our comment on the wording of our 
title. The term “legacy” implies the death of the one 
from whom the objects of value are derived. Yet, if we 
would echo Mark Twain, of whom in the entire roster of 
philosophers could one say more safely than of Kant that 
the reports of his death are greatly exaggerated? Call- 
ing to mind the number of those who acquire and develop 
philosophic minds by contact with him, the number who 
state their doctrines by reference to problems and distinc- 
tions of his formulation, or who live in and through contro- 
versy with him; and noting the number whether of publi- 
cations or of lectures and courses of study aroused by him, 
are we not moved to ask: Who is today more vigorously 
alive—indeed, speaking generally, who during the entire 
period since 1781 has been more vigorously alive—than 
Immanuel Kant? 

These reflections conjure up vivid memories of the 
deeply impressive celebration with which the Albertus- 
Universitaet and Koenigsberg paid homage, last April, to 





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AVE 


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CANT’S C 
(Dedicated April 21, 1924) 


MENT OVER | 


Monu 


THE LEGACY OF KANT 5 


the greatest among those who have as yet appeared in their 
midst. Outstanding is the memory of the morning dur- 
ing which there was dedicated the newly erected chapel 
over Kant’s grave. The day was cold and dark, with pene- 
trating gusts of wind and driving showers. But one who 
approached the Dom where the exercises were to begin 
found the thoroughfares thronged with people. Further 
along, the streets were roped off; thus alone, and by the 
presence of guards at the portals of the Dom, could the 
invited guests have gained unobstructed access to their 
appointed places. The tense, solemn expectancy of the 
crowd through which one passed; the impressiveness of 
the magnificent Gothic interior, in candle illumination; the 
subdued spirit and formality that prevailed; a conscious- 
ness of the unique character of the occasion; the measured 
march, in full academic costume and regalia, of the stu- 
dent groups, faculty, rectors of universities, and officials 
of Koenigsberg, Prussia, and Germany proceeding, with 
organ accompaniment, down the main aisle to positions 
and seats to the rear of and flanking the rostrum, where 
as the orators of the morning there were the venerable 
educator, Dr. Stettiner, and Adolf von Harnack, Europe’s 
most distinguished scholar in the historical fields of theol- 
ogy—all so reinforced the impressions surviving from the 
two preceding days as to yield an experience of ultimate 
reality—an experience such as is evoked, very commonly, 
by the contemplation or presence of death. So one felt 
strongly as though at a funeral. With fluctuating degrees 
of intensity, however, came also the realization that Kant’s 
funeral was a matter of the long distant past, that it had 
occurred with similarly impressive exercises and unusual 
demonstrations of popular regard over a century ago, and 
that it was the second burial chapel that was presently 





1A somewhat detailed account of this celebration may be found in a paper, 
by the present writer, on “The Kantfeier in Koenigsberg,” The Philosophical 
Review, XXXIII, No. 5, pp. 433-449. 


6 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


to be dedicated. Yet, still again, one experienced, at times 
even predominantly, a haunting sense of the time-trans- 
cending character of the critical philosopher. Had not 
Professor Hans Vaihinger only the day before insisted 
that the spirit of Kant’s philosophy is ever young and that 
in one way or another it manifests itself in all the signifi- 
cant philosophical movements in the Germany of today? 
One by one the numerous divergent types of thought were 
examined. The Kantian source of voluntaristic systems 
seemed obvious, as also that of the value philosophies of 
Windelband, Rickert and Miinsterberg. The influential 
Als-Ob philosophers, with their new organ, the Annalen 
der Philosophie, and their valuable studies particularly 
in the philosophy of religion as well as in logic, but de- 
velop certain Kantian strains of thought, more especially 
various fruitful conceptions included in the discussion of 
the transcendental ideas and of the implications of the 
moral experience. Eucken and his followers draw heavily 
upon Kant, as do even more directly Cohen, Natorp, Cas- 
sirer, Gorland, and the entire Marburger school. The 
efforts of Dilthey and, more recently, of Spranger, to es- 
tablish the number and the nature of the fundamental types 
of philosophy grounded in the nature of man simply con- 
tinue the work of Kant, who declared these to be three 
in number, namely, dogmatism, scepticism and criticism. 
Troeltsch’s metaphysics of religion and history, Vaihinger 
had argued, Stern’s personalistic philosophy, Driesch’s 
neo-vitalism, Husserl’s and Scheler’s phenomenalism, and 
even the more subtle formulations of recent spiritualism— 
do not these exhaust the remaining philosophic movements 
today current in Germany, and can it be doubted that in 
one respect or another they all exhibit the powerful impact 
of Kant? 

Could a similar thesis be maintained with respect to 
other countries? Surely not so easily. And yet, let us 


THE LEGACY OF KANT 7 


note what Ruggiero has said: “The characteristic fea- 
ture of contemporary French philosophy is its orientation, 
partly conscious, partly unconscious, toward the Hegelian 
idealism. Traces of Hegelianism are to be found in Boirac; 
Lachelier is a Hegelian, and Weber has arrived at his 
absolute positivism through the Hegelian philosophy. The 
anti-intellectualistic motive of the philosophy of intuition 
and its conception of reality as act, as creation, are all 
Hegelian elements. . . . Blondel’s Hegelianism is manifest 
and, indeed, the immanentism of the modernists . . . and 
Loisy’s conception of history also reveal the same origin.’” 
In making these statements Ruggiero refers to the prob- 
lem and doctrine of Hegel and explicitly disavows imply- 
ing anything with respect to historical sources; moreover, 
not all influences emanating from Hegel are to be traced 
back more ultimately to Kant. Even so, however, the 
fertility of the latter remains amazing, especially when 
we recall Renouvier and French phenomenalism or neo- 
criticism; Lachelier, referred to by Ruggiero as the “most 
distinguished representative of the Kantian movement in 
France—who stands out as the most profoundly specula- 
tive mind of modern French Philosophy”’;*? Noel, Berthe- 
lot, Liard, Evellin and Brunschvieg, discussed by Ruggiero 
under the heading, “The Kantians.”’ A similar impression 
of Kant’s influence is gained when one observes the very 
numerous references to him in such outstanding books as 
Bergson’s Evolution Créatrice. Even more directly does 
Italian philosophy exemplify the living power of Kant’s 
works: Del Vecchio and the neo-Kantians in epistemol- 
ogy, Croce, Gentile and the school of new idealism at once 
come to mind. In England, the Rhine—or should one not 
say the Pregel?—began to flow into the Thames with the 
translations and essays of Coleridge and of Carlyle, and, 


more philosophically, with the contributions of Ferrier, 


2 Modern Philosophy, English edition, p. 224. 
3 Tbid., p. 148. 


g IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


Stirling, Green, Wallace, Nettleship, Edward and John 
Caird and many others. The dominance of Kantian strains 
of thought soon became almost exclusive. And those who 
now contest it by no means all declare their independence 
from Kant; their Kantian heritage too has been consid- 
erable though from somewhat different elements of doc- 
trine. And so, Mr. Laird, a spokesman from the realistic 
camp, has recently said: “If we could visit the great ones 
in Valhalla, we should all, I suppose, seek Kant first among 
the moderns, and present our humble duty to the little, 
peerless, spieszbiirgerlich iconoclast from Koenigsberg ; 
yet we should honor, him chiefly for the incomparable fer- 
tility of his genius, and most lesser philosophers, so far as 
I know, are eager to indicate their dissent from much that 
he says.”* And may not similar things be said of our own 
land and of Canada? Who that concerns himself with 
the kinships of pragmatism, and particularly of instrumen- 
talism, and considers the various wings of idealism, from 
the more extreme pluralisms and personalisms of Howison 
on the Pacific and Bowne on the Atlantic to the monisms, 
whether of the dominantly voluntaristic sort of Royce, the 
more aesthetically and mystically toned varieties of Balc- 
win and of Hocking, or the more intellectualistic types of 
Creighton and of Watson; who that recalls what, by way 
of reaction, led to our divergent realisms; who that in- 
quires into the influences reflected either by our various 
philosophical periodicals, from the Journal of S peculative 
Philosophy down, or by the men who have stimulated and 
directed philosophical thought in the class rooms and sem- 
inars of our colleges and universities—who, with this be- 
fore his mind, would flout the assertion that, during the 
decades during which we have been living, no philosophic 
thinker has exercised a more widespread or vital power 


in America than has Immanuel Kant? Now and then, to 


4 Contemporary British Philosophy: Personal Statements, edited by J. H. 
Muirhead, pp. 223. 


THE LEGACY OF KANT 9 


be sure, one has heard a stray voice proclaiming that the 
path to significant philosophy leads not through but around 
Kant. With his characteristic independence, William 
James has so contended. Hence it is not impertinent to 
point out that James’ own debt to Kant was very consider- 
able. Let him who seeks the evidence consider the influ- 
ence upon James of the neo-Kantian Renouvier or trace 
back the contentions of James with respect to voluntarism 
and the ‘“‘will to believe’’; and let him note also that simply 
in the course of a commentary on Kant such a writer as 
Kemp Smith is impelled more than once to call attention to 
points in James that carry over or develop Kantian ideas. 

That course of responses and experiences which is ordi- 
narily called the life of a man covered in the case of Kant 
somewhat less than eighty years, and these were of a sort 
ordinarily regarded as decidedly uneventful. This life, 
however, projected itself into objective spirit, into a philos- 
ophy which has remained perpetually young and fruitful, 
a source of stimulus and suggestion, continuing today, as 
throughout the past century and a half, to generate master 
minds. If, then, we would use the term “legacy” in refer- 
ence to Kant, we should avoid conceiving this as consisting 
of deeds and thoughts that have their brief day and then 
succumb the victims of history and of time. Kant’s legacy 
—and this is a thesis which we wish particularly to stress 
—is a living, a perpetually dynamic legacy. Kant indeed 
figures prominently in any purely historical portrayal of 
human philosophizing; no one laying claim to historical 
erudition dare remain ignorant of him. Moreover, he 
belongs in that still more select group comprising those 
by whose achievements mankind has been lifted to percept- 
ibly higher levels of outlook and practice and to nobler 
appreciations and aspirations. But even more than this 
may be claimed. Kant must be counted not merely among 
the leading figures of the eighteenth century and among 


10 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


those through whose leadership mankind has taken a dis- 
tinct step forward; he assuredly belongs also to that com- 
pany of immortals who have created literature and art, 
religions, philosophies, or other spirtual productions such 
that, whatever the course of progress and whatever the 
changes and wrecks of time, generation after generation 
constantly find in them that which clarifies and extends 
vision, gives impetus to more sustained endeavor, and is 
productive of novel insights and fresh creation. 

This living, generative power of Kant’s thought, mani- 
fest, as we have thus noticed in our own day, expressed 
itself no less strongly in the past. In 1865 there appeared 
a book, Kant und die E pigonen, in which the author, Otto 
Liebmann, concludes each chapter save one with the conten- 
tion, “Also muse auf Kant zuriickgegangen wurden.” Lieb- 
mann was as convinced as was Weisse that if philosophy 
wished to go forward it must go back to Kant. The period 
was one of philosophical sterility, comparatively speaking, 
pretty much throughout the western world. Comte, it is 
true, had only just finished his brilliant work and his ideas 
were still bearing fruit, especially under the nurture of his 
French disciple, Littré. Yet that which the Comtean posi- 
tivism held in promise for general philosophy was far from 
reassuring. In England, Mill had a short time previously 
published his Logic, but this also, while indubitably a solid 
achievement, could scarcely be expected to inaugurate a 
new golden age in philosophy. Spencer, at the time of 
Liebmann’s book, was only beginning to develop his sys- 
tem. So the most stimulating ideas manifest in English 
thought were, as in the case of France, Kantian in their 
ultimate source. It was Germany that Liebmann himself 
had in mind. Here the enthusiasm at the outset aroused 
by the elaborate constructions erected by Hegel, Schopen- 
hauer and Herbart’on Kantian bases had given away to 
hostility, or, worse still, to indifference toward philosophy 


THE LEGACY OF KANT ri 


generally. Concentrated intellectual effort became a mon- 
opoly of the empirical sciences and of minute investigation. 
In philosophy, anarchy prevailed. Schelling, Hegel, Her- 
bart, and Schopenhauer all had scattered disciples and 
there were numerous eclectics and proponents of inconse- 
quential speculative systems. There were also the so-called 
Real-Idealists who “distilled a philosophical theism out of 
the pantheism of greater thinkers”; and, in glaring con- 
trast to them, the materialists and the monists who uncriti- 
cally derived from the doctrines of biological evolution 
and other scientific discoveries confused and shallow sys- 
tems of epistemology and metaphysics. Then there came 
that growing sense of need for philosophical recovery 
which almost inevitably, one is inclined to say, crystallized 
itself in the slogan, Back to Kant. This was the state of 
affairs at the time of the Kantian centenary of 1881. The 
return to Kant was made. And what appeared? It was 
this: The return to Kant means a return not to the secur- 
ity and authority of a dogmatic system nor to the benumb- 
ing atmosphere of scepticism; it is a return not to a place 
of rest but to a point of fresh departure, affording promis- 
ing suggestions and stimulus for renewed philosophic ex- 
ploration. In quick succession there arose numerous philo- 
sophic movements which, though widely divergent in many 
of their features, were alike in the enjoyment of vigorous 
independent life. Twenty-three years after the centenary 
of 1881 came the one of 1904, and within this short space 
of time, the cry Zuriick zu Kant gave way to the slogan 
Von Kant aus, iiber Kant hinaus. What more convinc- 
ing proof can be offered of the supreme importance of the 
Kantian philosophy than the fact that a return to it thus 
led to fresh advances from and beyond it? The warmest 
admirers of Kant, therefore, need take no offence but 
should rather feel pride in the oft-echoed phrase, Kant ver- 
stehen heiset tiber Ihn hinausgehen. 


5 HE IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


And was not the generative power of the critical phil- 
osophy peculiarly manifest at its first appearance? This 
occurred at a time when the empirical sciences had not as 
yet developed the technique and the content of which they 
may now boast. In consequence, they did not enjoy the 
same prestige either academically or in the wider world. 
First principles, that is, philosophy, was a required study 
in Germany, whether students were registered for work in 
science, theology or law. Moreover, the educated middle 
class was already fairly large in Germany, and their inter- 
ests likewise included philosophy, even though their attain- 
ments commonly extended no further than the bandying 
about of phrases.° Thus metaphysics possessed a certain 
vogue. Nevertheless it had already, as we read in the 
preface to the first Critique, been dethroned from its royal 
place among the sciences. Moreover, while numerous phil- 
osophical tendencies were current, none enjoyed competent 
sponsorship or enthusiastically convinced followers. Along 
with scholasticism, both Catholic and Protestant, the 
rationalism of Wolff was in the ascendency, yet Voltaire, 
Montesquieu, Rousseau, and La Mettrie were already mak- 
ing themselves felt. Hume's Inquiry Concerning the 
Human Understanding was rendered into German as early 
as 1775 and almost immediately its sceptical influence be- 
gan to spread. Psychological interests were stirred by the 
works of Condillac and by the translations, appearing one 
by one, of Bonnet and Batteux, of Hutcheson, Burke, and 
Home. Here and there, a Spinozistic voice was raised. 
In many cases the need for a unitary view of the world 
was stilled by a superficial eclecticism. There was indeed 


an earnest desire for an intellectually commanding meta- 


5 See the detailed and illuminating account of the philosophical journals, 
and the organs for philosophical articles, in the Germany of the period from 
the eighteenth century to the present in Reichls Philosophischer Almanach 
for 1924, pp. 302-462. “Denn noch war die ganze Nation, soweit sie Bildung 
besass, ihren Denkern su folgen imstande, so dass diese es sich leisten konnten, 
rat Soren Publikum gu treten. Kant und Fichte haben es so gemacht” 

Dp. : 


THE LEGACY OF KANT 13 


physics yet there was increasing despair over the possibil- 
ity of achieving one. Here is the picture as Kant paints it: 
“At present,” he writes, “it is the fashion to despise Meta- 
physic. After everything has been tried, so they say, and 
tried in vain, there reign in philosophy weariness and com- 
plete indifferentism, the mother of chaos and night in all 
sciences but, at the same time, the spring or, at least, the 
prelude of their near reform and of a new light, after an 
ill-applied study has rendered them dark, confused, and 
useless.” * Then it was that the Critique appeared. Imme- 
diately it gripped the imagination of scholars, and ere long 
it swept from one end of the land to the other. In 178s, 
it was espoused by the Allegemine Literaturzeitung of 
Jena; by 1793, it was possible to collate a bibliography of 
over two hundred titles relating to it. Even before this 
latter date, it had passed to the lips of the fashionable and 
leisured, and copies of the book lay on the tables of drawing 
rooms. To suggest a concrete picture of what occurred 
one might refer to the universal excitement aroused in our 
own day by Bergson and Einstein—the feverish activity 
among scholars, the popularized expositions and the en- 
comiums in the magazine literature, and the clamor in 
the press and among the non-understanding public. Of 
course, the critical philosophy was not without opposition. 
In Hessen, it was forbidden to lecture on Kant, and in 
Heidelberg a professor was dismissed for venturing to dis- 
cuss his doctrine, the charge being that Kant was a pure 
Spinozist and atheist. Many, on the other hand, were car- 
ried into such transports by the philosophy that the latter 
assumed to them a genuinely religious significance. Thus 
Fernow wrote: “God spake: Let there be light; and there 
came—the Kantian philosophy.” Baggesen, a friend of 
Wieland’s went so far as to call Kant a second Messiah. 
And it was to Kant himself that Stilling wrote thus, in a 


8 Critique of Pure Reason, tr. by F. Max Miller, p. xix. 


14 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


letter dated March 1, 1789: “You are a great, a very great 
instrument in the hand of God. I do not flatter—but your 
philosophy will work a far greater, far more general, and 
far more blessed revolution than Luther’s Reform. As 
soon as one has well comprehended the Critique of Reason, 
one sees that no refutation of it is possible. Your phil- 
osophy must therefore be eternal and unchangeable, and 
its beneficent effects will bring back the religion of Jesus 
to its original purity, when its only purpose was holiness.” ‘ 
From the side of literary men, one recalls Jean Paul Rich- 
ter’s characterization of Kant as not only a light of the 
world but as a whole solar system in one, and Goethe’s 
similar, though naturally more restrained expression, that 
on reading Kant one feels like stepping into a lighted room. 
Holderlin, in a letter to his brother, writes: “Kant is the 
Moses of our nation, who is leading it from Egyptian stag- 
nation into the free, lonely desert of his speculation and 
brings the dynamic law from the holy mount.” The poet- 
philosopher, Schiller, who would never have been the Schil- 
ler that he was except for the influence of Kant, said: “The 
fundamental ideas of Kant’s ideal philosophy will remain 
a treasure forever, and for their sake alone we ought to be 
grateful to have been born in this age.” Not otherwise 
was the experience and the testimony of the more technical 
philosophers. Schopenhauer calls the Critique “the high- 
est achievement of human reflection” ; and the aged Schell- 
ing in a reminiscent mood refers to the splendid time when 
“through the work of Kant and Fichte the liberated human 
spirit recognized itself in antithesis to all being as enjoy- 
ing real freedom and felt justified in asking, not “what is” 
but “what may be,’ and when at the same time Goethe 

7 Kant’s Schriften, edition of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, XI, p. 
8f. Quoted by F. Max Miller in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. lix. In 
the section of his preface from which this quotation is drawn, Max Miiller 
cites numerous quotations of a similar sort. One of them we have used in 


the above paragraph, though we are greatly indebted also to Kroner’s recent 
volume, Von Kant Bis Hegel, pp. 1-4, and to Kilpe’s Immanuel Kant, Chap. I. 


THE LEGACY OF KANT 15 


stood forth as the high example of artistic perfection.” 
Let these quotations and these names transport our imagi- 
nations back into that period of almost unprecedentedly 
tense and confident expectation, eager inquiry, bold con- 
struction, and vivid conviction that a new era of philosophy 
and human culture had begun. In contrast with the phil- 
osophical somnolence and confusion just prior to 1781, 
this immediately subsequent period was so athrob with 
life and anticipation that it has reminded one of its most 
recent students, Richard Kroner, of the eschatological 
hopes at the time when Christianity had its rise. The pri- 
mary power involved was, of course, the sage of Koenigs- 
berg. Truly of him must it be said that he created a phil- 
osophy that is itself creative. Thus alone do we give ade- 
quate recognition to the sort of legacy that Kant has be- 
queathed unto mankind. 

By virtue of what qualities is the Kantian philosophy so 
fruitful? In the first place because it is replete with flashes 
of suggestion and imagination. Mr. Bax has even ven- 
tured to maintain that “there is scarcely a doctrine or por- 
tion of modern science or controversy, the germ of which 
is not to be found in Kant hazarded, it may be, in the form 
of a mere idle fancy, but unmistakably there.” Kant, he 
continues, “was a Titan alike in the range and depth of his 
knowledge, as in his almost unequalled and certainly un- 
surpassed intellectual grasp. The only other thinker in 
the world’s history who can be deemed worthy of a place 
beside him for this all but unique combination of qualities 
is perhaps Aristotle.* 

The critical philosophy is fruitful also because it strug- 
gles hard to discern and to give full recognition to the ele- 
ments of truth in all the various tendencies of its day, how- 
ever opposed these might be to one another or to Kant’s 


own attitudes. More clearly, in many cases, than their fol- 


8 Introductory essay to his translation of Kant’s Prolegomena (Bohn’s 
Philosophical Library), p. Ixxi. 


16 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


lowers did Kant understand their points of strength, and 
more certainly than their opponents, their fundamental de- 
fects. This acumen, exercised by one as judicious as he 
was subtle, makes the Kantian critiques peculiarly reward- 
ing to every earnest student. 

Furthermore, it is important to note that, in the case 
of Kant, a fact that challenges interest at once becomes 
a problem regarding basic principles. To cite a single 
illustration: Metaphysics, though long and ardently pur- 
sued, was lacking in the steady progress and the assured 
results achieved by even the younger empirical sciences. 
To philosophers generally, this was a fact arousing com- 
ment, humor or derision, or disappointment, as the case 
may be, or, perhaps, even debate as to whether it really 
after all was a fact. To Kant, it generated a problem, and 
mankind was enriched by one of the most significant books 
that have come out of modern Europe. And so in associ- 
ation with Kant we turn from petty worries, disappoint- 
ments and delights, or from vain disputes, to a whole- 
souled search for the meaning and validity of principles. 
Thus do we win wider horizons; thus, in reading Kant, do 
we come to feel, as did Goethe, that we are stepping into 
a lighted room. 

We may find a fourth reason for the peculiarly stirring 
and generative quality of Kant’s writings in the nature 
of the issues with which they so forcefully wrestle. One 
of the constant drives of his thinking, for example, was a 
question that has since become central in popular thinking 
no less than in philosophic debate. This question, which 
he was the first to make pivotal and to formulate in a fruit- 
ful fashion, is no other than that as to whether human 
freedom, and all that it holds in stake, can be rescuec in 
the face of the presuppositions, approved methods, and 
tested conclusions of the natural sciences. Moreover, in 
view of the indubitable fact that the human individual be- 


THE LEGACY OF KANT 17 


longs to the world which such sciences describe and sub- 
ject to causal determination, can one predicate any unique 
or intrinsic value to man, or can one rationally believe in 
his survival after death? Indeed, more generally, what of 
purpose remains in the world, and what is the relation of 
values to the order of fact? Can unreserved commitment 
to the aims and established conclusions of the natural sci- 
ences, on the one hand, or unqualified acceptance of the 
autonomy of the moral individual, on the other, exist in 
company with a belief in God? Is it strange that a pro- 
found mind whose earnest spirit was nurtured under piet- 
istic influences and whose study of the natural sciences 
was amazingly thorough should formulate and discuss 
these ultimate issues in a manner perpetually suggestive 
to inquiring minds? The commemorative tablet affixed to 
the wall of the castle in Koenigsberg appropriately 
selects a single quotation from Kant: “Two things fill the 
mind with ever new and increasing admiration and rever- 
ence, the more often and the longer one reflects upon them: 
the starry heaven above me and the moral law within.” To 
one who thoroughly understood the nature of the revolu- 
tion wrought by his countryman, Copernicus, and who ad- 
vanced the nebular hypothesis long before it was independ- 
ently developed by LaPlace, what may have been the reflec- 
tions aroused by the starry heavens in so far as these have 
any connection with the moral law within? May they not 
have been these: How incidental and insignificant are not 
man and his terrestrial abode; how lost in the vast ex- 
panses of space and how flitting in the perspective of cos- 
mic aeons? Or, in words that Kant well knew, ‘What is 
man that thou art mindful of him?” To this the voice of 
the moral law unhesitatingly and confidently makes reply: 
“Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and 
hast crowned him with glory and honor.” It is because 
he took with bitter seriousness both propositions of the 


18 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


antinomy, and brought to bear upon them all the powers 
of a great mind that Kant’s writings live and create life. 

They do this, in the fifth place, because, by their very 
quality, as by their obvious doctrinal tendencies, they rouse 
men to self-activity. They hold, as did Goethe, that Am 
Anfang war die Tat. Analytic and critical in method, they 
stress the spontaneity of reason in the knowledge process, 
and teach that it is only through its activity that we have 
an ordered world of experience. Mind, they insist, exists 
only as active. The essence, too, of their ethical doctrines, 
and the keynote to their teachings as a whole, is freedom, 
autonomy, self-determination, heroic faith. 

And now, in further explanation of the creative qual- 
ity of the critical philosophy, should we refer also to the 
specific doctrines central or peculiar to them? This query 
invites us into debatable fields but time prevents us from 
even entering them. Let each seek an answer for himself 
after hearing the various speakers on our program pre- 
sent the outlines of Kant’s teaching in the several depart- 
ments of his investigation. It seems only fair to say, how- 
ever, that Kant’s methods and principles, and the conclu- 
sions which they yield, have not been unassailed, and that 
few thinkers, if any, would declare them unassailable. It 
is extremely difficult to determine precisely what Kant as 
a matter of historical fact either taught or meant to teach, 
and in how far it may or may not be true of him that the 
letter killeth but the spirit maketh alive. We must not for- 
get that Kant more than once sharply rebuked the prac- 
tice of departing from the letter of doctrines and seizing 
upon and developing what is alleged to be their spirit.’ 
But in the letter of Kant’s writings there is scarcely an 
important point with respect to which variant, if not even 
mutually incompatible, statements may not be collated. In 
addition, there is the formidable task of adjudicating the 


9 Kant’s Schriften, edition of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, XII 
pp. 393f., 397. 


THE LEGACY OF KANT 19 


relative emphasis belonging to the various elements of the 
complex system. Here, ripened individual judgment alone, 
and no universally accepted conclusion, seems possible. So 
commentators of Kant are to this day in deadlock, and bit- 
ter struggles continue as to which philosopher or type of 
philosophy represents Kant’s legitimate heir.*® Adickes 
has recently inaugurated an attempt to put an end to this 
state of affairs; through widespread intellectual co-opera- 
tion, it is proposed to establish authoritatively just what 
were the Kantian teachings. But it is very doubtful 
whether the attempt is not misconceived in its aims, and 
whether it could possibly succeed in fact. The reason lies 
in part—though in part alone—in the abundant wealth and 
comprehensiveness of thought in the Kantian writings, and 
in their desire to render to every tendency and element its 
full and just claims in every context. And this too under- 
lies the perpetual fruitfulness of Kant’s work. 

The critical philosophy is in a peculiar degree a mirror 
of Kant himself. In commemorating him, we bring before 
ourselves a person of unmistakable individuality. His life 
was exceptionally ordered and unified and was yet respon- 
sive to the appeals of nature and to all things human as 
well. His personality at once charms us by its simplicity 
and astonishes us by its richness and diversity, no less than 
by its force. His character exhibits integrity, self-dis- 
cipline, singleness of aim; yet it is without narrowness or 
self-seeking, without harshness or hardness. As few others, 
he was imbued with a sense of the intrinsic value of truth; 
the annals of philosophy tell of no one who devoted his 
life more exclusively, more earnestly, more open-mindedly 
or painstakingly than he in its quest. Linked with this 

10In his own day, Kant was urged publicly to announce which of his 
expositors understood him as he wished to be understood. Cf. ibid., pp. 390, 393. 
An admirable discussion of various explanations that have been advanced to 
account for the differences between interpretations of Kant may be found in 


Max Frischeisen-Kohler’s recent essay, “Probleme und Aufgaben der Kant- 
Forschung,” Reichls Philosophischer Almanach for 1924, p. 46ff. 


20 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


keen theoretic interest, however, was an unwavering re- 
spect for the dignity and authority of the moral life. It is 
a revelation of himself, and not mere phrases, that Kant 
gives in his eloquent apostrophe to duty: “Duty! Thou 
sublime and mighty name that dost embrace nothing 
charming or insinuating, but requirest submission, and yet 
seekest not to move the will by threatening aught that 
would arouse natural aversion or terror, but merely holdest 
forth a law which of itself finds entrance into the mind, 
and yet gains reluctant reverence (though not always obe- 
dience), a law before which all inclinations are dumb, even 
though they secretly counter-work it; what origin is there 
worthy of thee, and where is to be found the root of thy 
noble descent which proudly rejects all kindred with the 
inclinations; a root to be derived from which is the indis- 
pensable condition of the only worth which men can give 
themselves?” But it was this same exacting self-critical 
thinker and this reverentially dutiful spirit who, impressed 
by the imperishable element in Rousseau, declared that 
without enthusiasm nothing great has ever been accom- 
plished. To the complacent optimism of current rational- 
ism and Leibniz’s description of this as the best of all pos- 
sible worlds, Kant was unable to subscribe. For this he 
was too conscious of the havoc caused by nature and of the 
“radically evil” in man; for this he was too delicately sensi- 
tive to the inequalities in the social system. As regards 
his judgment of man and society as they are, Kant must 
be classed as a pessimist. Yet his spirt was too virile to 
accept existing conditions as final. Intimately bound up 
with the performance of duty, he both realized and taught, 
is faith in the possibility of human perfectibility. For him, 
therefore, such faith was itself a moral requirement. 
Kant’s attitude and teaching, then, were neither optimistic 
nor pessimistic; nor were they precisely what is today de- 


11 Critique of Practical Reasons, tr. by Abbott, p. 180. 


THE LEGACY OF KANT 21 


scribed as melioristic. They were heroistic. It was an earlier 
compatriot of his—a man with whose name that of Kant 
is often joined—who dared follow the call of duty and set 
forth for Worms even though the devils there might be 
found to be as numerous as the shingles on the houses. 
Let this incident suggest the nature of that basic attitude 
toward life which we have called heroistic. Kant, the 
Alleszermalmer, had demolished, as he believed, the classic 
arguments for the existence of God; had demonstrated 
the impossibility of knowledge transcending the objects of 
the space-time world, and the universality within this 
world of causal determination. Nevertheless, with invinc- 
ible, heroic faith he identified his deepest being with the 
moral self and founded a kingdom of the spirit on the cate- 
gorical dictates of the practical reason. 

Kant’s urbanity, delight in social intercourse, and appre- 
ciation of friends are given special prominence in the com- 
memorative exercises annually held by an organization in 
Koenigsberg called “Society of the Friends of Kant.” On 
every 22nd of April since Kant’s death on February 12, 
1804, a group, now grown to a membership of about one 
hundred, has held a commemorative meal. Since 1812 this 
has gone by the name of Bohnenmahl. For it is the cus- 
tom to bury a bean in an immense cake, a piece of which, 
in the course of the meal, is received by each of the mem- 
bers. The person securing the piece containing the bean 
is declared the Bohnenkoenig. With two ministers of his 
selection he rules over the exercises of the ensuing year 
and from him there is on that occasion expected an address 
on some topic relating to Kant. In its whimsicalities, its 
fine fellowship, its introduction of the lighter veins of con- 
versation in the midst of, or more generally, prior to seri- 
ous discussion, the Bohnenmahl aims to reproduce the 
meals to which Kant daily invited a number of his friends, 
representing men from various lines of professional and 


22 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


business activity and from various nationalities. 

Cosmopolitan in his interests and sympathies, deeply re- 
spectful of the universally human which he found in all 
types and stations of men, zealous in his devotion to truth, 
singularly impressed by the claims of duty, cognizant of 
the power of enthusiasm and of the refining and expand- 
ing effects of intercourse between friends and table com- 
panions, Kant was withal a self-possessed, integrated and 
concentrated personality. Fascinating and stimulating, 
alike in his simplicity and in his astounding multiplicity of 
interests and capacities, Kant is essentially spirit, and a 
spirit of rare individuality. 

During the pathetic years of his decline, Kant had as 
his physician a university colleague, who was at the time 
also rector of the Albertus. On one of the last occasions 
when the latter went to visit his patient, Kant, though long 
too feeble to move about securely, arose and refused to 
take a chair before his physician and colleague was seated, 
remarking, with a forced concentration of his remaining 
powers of mind and of speech, “The feeling of humanity 
has not yet forsaken me.” And during the night between 
the 11th and 12th of February, 1804, he whispered to his 
faithful friend, Wasianski, his last words: “Es ist gut.” 

As we consider the legacy bequeathed by Kant to man- 
kind—as we consider his character and the philosophy into 
which he projected the deepest experiences and reflections 
of strenuous decades—must not we echo the words, “It is 
good?’ And may we not, with increased conviction, re- 
peat the words with which we began: “It is altogether fit- 
ting that we break sufficiently from our accustomed round 
of lectures and other college activities to unite, during 
these days, in commemorating the life and work of Imman- 
uel Kant.” 

Epwarp L. ScHAvB. 

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY. 


THE NEED AND PossIBILity oF AN I MPERATIVISTIC ErHic 


ae fe eS 


, 





THE NEED AND POSSIBILITY OF AN 
IMPERATIVISTIC ETHIC 


jf WILL be the purpose of this paper to show that an 
imperativistic ethics, such as that of Kant, is more 
conducive to social morale and the health of society than 
other systems of ethics, such as those of hedonism or self- 
realization. On the other hand, the trend in modern ethics 
has for a hundred years been consistently away from im- 
perativistic ethics and in the direction of self-realization 
and hedonistic systems. We are thus faced by a kind of 
dilemma and we have to inquire whether there is any way 
out of it. Presently, we must ask whether there are not 
some signs in very recent philosophical movements of a 
return to an imperativistic ethics. 

Kant’s ethical system has a certain sublimity which has 
made a powerful popular appeal through all the time since 
he wrote. Its superlative emphasis upon freedom; its 
noble exaltation of duty, which evermore says simply, 
“Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not’’; its doctrine of a cate- 
gorical imperative which disdains to speak of reasons; its 
teaching that the motive of moral action is found in mere 
respect for the moral law without consideration of conse- 
quences ; its belief that our knowledge of moral law comes 
not through experience but through intuition; and finally 
its three famous formulae, which in all specific cases guide 
us unerringly to a proper course of conduct—all these have 
tended to awaken respect and admiration for the Kantian 


OG IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


ethics. As a system it may be logically defective at each 
stage, but in practice it works. Pragmatically it justifies 
itself. 

But under the scrutiny of the reflective thought of the 
present, any a priori, absolutist, or imperativistic moral 
system fares badly. During the nineteenth century the in- 
creasing insurgency of evolutionary naturalism turned us 
quite away from the a priori, imperativistic systems, nat- 
uralism claiming to know nothing of a categorical impera- 
tive, nothing of the autonomy of the will—nor even of any 
will at all except as a general name for “activities of con- 
trol’—nothing of an absolute duty which has to render 
no reasons for itself, nothing of principles of morals given 
a priori, nothing of a freedom which is independent of the 
laws of nature. It looked with deepest suspicion upon a 
metaphysics of morals which should be “free from all ad- 
mixture of empirical psychology, physics, and hyperphys- 
ics.” It ridiculed the notion that the knowledge of moral 
action must be mere respect for the moral law itself, as if 
the latter were something to be adored with quaking fear. 
It made merry over the doctrine that an action loses its 
moral quality when inclination leads that way and like- 
wise over the assertion that the moral character of an 
action is independent of its consequences. It claimed to 
find Kant guilty of a childish fallacy when he put forward 
as the content of the moral law the principle that we 
should always act in such a way that we can will that the 
maxim of our action should become a universal law, since 
one would never propose such a principle unless he had a 
reason for it—such for instance as the welfare of society. 
And finally, it found altogether incomprehensible the 
notion of a noumenal world whose laws of action are not 
the same as the laws of nature in our present environment. 

It was claimed that Kant was not at his best in his ethi- 
cal writings, that while his dialectical skill as shown in his 


NEED OF IMPERATIVISTIC ETHICS DAP 


Critique of Pure Reason was well-nigh superhuman, his 
ethical writings were the works of his later years, when 
the fire of his intellect was somewhat dimmed and the first 
feeling of fatigue was causing him to sink back into the 
everlasting arms of reverence and duty. By birth, by 
early training, by national culture, he belonged to the dis- 
ciplined souls, those who never fail in obeisance to duty, 
to conscience, and to morality. In his Metaphysics of 
Ethics and in his Practical Reason, the pietism of Kant’s 
youth was coming to expression. His Critique of Pure 
Reason was the work of his intellectual prime; it was the 
expression of his forebrain and hemispheres. The Critique 
of Practical Reason was the work of his early decline; it 
was the expression of his thalamus and his endocrine 
glands. It was claimed also that the influence of Rousseau 
had drawn Kant away from the strict logical and meta- 
physical studies, where his genius showed itself most pro- 
found, into the by-paths of humanism. 

No doubt, all these criticisms of the Kantian ethics have 
some force, but they impress us less than formerly. The 
dogmatic spirit of evolutionary naturalism is not now in 
harmony with the mood of inquiry encouraged by recent 
studies in philosophy. Nor has it been strengthened by 
the so-called new physics, nor by the theory of relativity, 
nor by the partial failure of that particular form of evolu- 
tion known as Darwinism. 

Not quite the same, however, can be said concerning the 
difficulties in the Kantian ethics arising from the 
newer genetic, psychological, historical, and social studies 
which were not available in Kant’s time. These surely 
have thrown great light on the theoretical problems of 
morals. 

The powerful influence of group life in shaping man’s 
moral nature was not fully appreciated by the author of 
the Practical Reason, or at any rate not congenial to his 


28 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


mood when he was working out his ethical theories. Our 
modern views have been shaped in accordance with these 
views. We use a different set of categories now. We 
speak of social instincts, social welfare, social customs, 
social pressure, the ridicule and approval of the group, 
social co-operation furthered by work and play, by primi- 
tive song and dance, and by primitive art. We find the 
roots of our moral lives in forces that are biological, social, 
and psychological. We find the social instincts to be the 
forerunners of moral sentiments and we trace the gradual 
rise of intelligence, heralding the emergence of mankind 
into an ethical environment, involving the reflective exam- 
ination of different ends and the rational choice of one 
rather than another. We see how moral character arises 
as a kind of dependability which an individual may come 
to have as his habitual responses are in the direction of the 
common social good, rather than in the direction of indi- 
vidual desires. Thus intuition becomes nothing more than 
the rapid appraisement of the worth of certain kinds of 
conduct, acquired dexterity of thought in all matters relat- 
ing to social behavior, gained through constant social con- 
tact in group life, where all behavior is good or bad be- 
havior as it accords or does not accord with the customs, 
traditions, and beliefs as to the supposed conditions of 
social welfare. 

The will, which figured so prominently in Kant’s ethics, 
is mentioned less often in our modern ethics. We speak 
rather of habits and tendencies and active dispositions; 
while instead of the pure good will and intention we speak 
more often of clinical history. We measure the moral 
quality of actions by their consequences; but we do not 
overlook the fact that in passing judgment upon the moral 
character of an individual we are not concerned so much 
with the consequences of any particular act as with the 
probable consequences of his future acts. The individual’s 


NEED OF IMPERATIVISTIC ETHICS 29 


clinical history, that is, his character, determines his prob- 
able future acts. We soon come to despise the man of good 
will whose good will is not shown by good deeds, and by 
good deeds we mean those which have good consequences, 
and good consequences are those which conduce to suc- 
cessful living in society. So it comes about that life is the 
category upon which modern ethics hinges. Our ethical 
systems are worked out largely in the sphere of biology 
and sociology. If we go back to the ants and bees, we find 
that their behavior, mechanized through the ages in the 
form of instincts, is quite unerringly directed to one very 
definite end, namely, the continued life of the species. 
Advancing to primitive mankind, we find the situation 
much the same, only that the social instincts are supple- 
mented by customs, contributing, or supposed to be con- 
tributing to the welfare of the group. And since individ- 
ual interests sometimes come into conflict with the social 
instincts and the tribal customs, there arise social approval 
and disapproval, ridicule, punishment, fear, reward—and 
gradually a peculiar sensitiveness on the part of the ind1- 
vidual to this social approval or disapproval. 

In some such way as this, ethics is studied in recent 
years, and at first it all seems quite foreign to the Kantian 
approach. The difference is still further manifest by the 
place taken in modern thought by reflective morality. 
Human intelligence arrives on the scene and loosens up 
the old morality of tradition, pruning away mistaken cus- 
toms and purifying and perfecting moral codes. 

In all this development of ethical theory it is taken for 
granted that social welfare is the final arbiter of moral 
laws, until finally human welfare itself is brought into the 
focus of criticism and resolved into its elements, such ele- 
ments being usually found in self-realization or the full 
activity of our powers, though sometimes happiness is still 
regarded as the final end. 


30 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


I cannot but think that this general approach to the 
moral problem is to be approved, and at first it seems quite 
as much opposed to the Kantian ethics as was evolutionary 
naturalism. Possibly it makes any return to the stand- 
point of Kant out of the question. Concerning this I shall 
inquire presently, but first | wish to discuss another aspect 
of the problem. I wish to speak of the distinctively im- 
perativistic elements in Kant’s system and see if we can- 
not find at least a kind of pragmatic justification for them. 

Some recent writer has called attention to the “frosty 
chill” that falls upon a class of students in ethics when the 
self-realization philosophy is explained to them and its 
logical strength revealed. In the enthusiasm which it 
excites, it is a bad third to the other theories, Kant’s abso- 
lutist and intuitive and imperativistic ethics ranking first, 
and hedonism second. As an illustration of this we may 
recall the blazing triumph of Fichte, when in the winter 
of 1808 he preached the gospel of duty and the categorical 
imperative in his remarkable Addresses to the German 
People. If you say that it was Fichte’s eloquence which 
moved the German people to assert their national rights 
and shake off the yoke of Napoleon, still, even an orator 
must have a text, and Fichte had a deep and powerful prin- 
ciple. To some extent the magnificent development of the 
German people during the hundred years following the 
death of Kant can be traced to the very gospel of loyalty, 
devotion, and non-reflective obedience to duty which was 
the basis of Kant’s practical philosophy. James Marti- 
neau with his doctrine of the intuitive worth of motives, 
Josiah Royce with his ethics of loyalty, or even Nietzsche 
with his gospel of manly strength, make an appeal which 
Bentham and Mill with their greatest happiness principle 
or perfectionists with their tables of values can never 
make. 


NEED OF IMPERATIVISTIC ETHICS a1 


The social situation which results from adherence to the 
Kantian imperativistic ethics is what we may call morale. 
It is the condition of discipline in all well-disciplined bodies. 
It implies instant and unconditional obedience to author- 
ity, together with respect for authority. It involves respect 
for authority, obedience to authority, and respect for and 
obedience to law—the three things which this age most 
needs. 

In military bodies the categorical imperative is the only 
thing that will work. Authority says, “Do this” and it 
is done. Reflective morality has no place here, and mili- 
tary methods get things done. We deplore the Great War 
and the evils which have sprung from it, but it had some 
fine lessons. That America could in the space of a few 
months raise an army of 4,000,000 men, train and equip 
them, project nearly two million of them across the Atlan- 
tic, build great ships and railroad systems, and hurl this 
army with resistless force upon a distant enemy, seemed 
to many like a miracle. But it depended upon morale. 
Officers, soldiers, and sailors did what they were told to do 
and went where they were sent. We can all remember the 
alacrity with which we got to our feet seven years ago 
when the national hymn was sung. 

But morale is more than instant obedience to authority. 
It involves respect for authority. After the signing of the 
Armistice, there was still obedience to authority in the 
army, but we recall the absence of morale. The inspira- 
tion of a great cause was lacking and with it the necessary 
- respect. 

In time of peace there has been a gradual breaking down 
of social morale throughout the world in our great social 
organisms. In recent times Italy and Russia have tried 
desperate methods to regain it, partially failing because 
of a divided allegiance, gaining indeed a kind of obedience 
but not universal loyalty. We have here, I suppose, the 


32 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


great problem of our modern world—how to secure social 
morale in our enormous states, containing fifty to one hun- 
dred million people, in the midst of wealth and luxury, 
with our mixed and shifting populations, our changing 
customs, our iconoclastic fiction, and our degenerate stage. 
Whence is to come that voice of authority, that autono- 
mous will, which is going to make all these people behave 
themselves? The starry heavens still remain, but the sen- 
timent of duty in the human soul seems to be disappear- 
ing. Rights have taken the place of duties. We live in a 
centrifugal and expansive age, restive of any restraint or 
control, revealing an almost pathological desire for free- 
dom and for the full and abundant life. 

Our whole mode of thought is individualistic, insurgent 
and romantic. We are restive under the restraints of old 
traditions and institutions. The loss of confidence, for in- 
stance, in our legislative bodies is a case in point. Mr. 
Gardiner. writing in the Atlantic Monthly on “The Twi- 
light of Parliament,” says, “The universal loss of faith in 
men, in institutions, in creeds, in theories, which is the 
devastating product of the war, has touched nothing, not 
even the church, more blightingly than it has touched par- 
liament.’’ This lack of confidence in our legislative bodies 
still further weakens our social morale. 

The enormous power of religion in the history of peo- 
ples in preserving moral standards and insuring social 
morale has been due to the very principles which underlie 
the Kantian ethics, namely, faith, devotion, loyalty, and 
reverence. Here, perhaps, is the key to the whole problem 
of morals. Devotion of some kind there must be—devotion 
to the flag, devotion to the church, devotion to conscience, 
or devotion to the mores of the past. 

What is lacking in our modern individualistic centrifu- 
gal society is the Kantian spirit of respect for the moral 
law. There is need of the “inner check,” the motive of 


NEED OF IMPERATIVISTIC ETHICS a3 


restraint and reserve, the discipline of the wise man who 
looks beyond the present. Such a wise man sees that any 
stable and happy society must have a centripetal motive. 
Some authority there must be, commanding our loyalty 
and respect, acting as an integrating force in an age 
threatened with social disintegration. Social evolution lies 
in the direction of a more integrated and disciplined social 
organism. It is the ethical society, not the wealthy, com- 
fortable, free society which will survive. 

It is not at all my purpose in this paper to exalt impera- 
tivistic morality in contrast with reflective morality. Prog- 
ress in morals comes through reflective morality and 
through the insight of great leaders. It is only that the 
pendulum in our own day has swung to the extreme, and 
reflective morality has reached its limit for the time. In 
Ibsen’s Doll’s House we see reflective morality, wisely per- 
haps, breaking away from the tyranny of unreasoned con- 
ventions, but in Mencken and Cabel and in unnumbered 
modern novels and plays we see it reaching and passing 
the limit. If we could strike a balance between reflective 
and imperativistic morality, we could attain to social prog- 
ress without danger of social disaster. 

Incidentally, it is interesting to notice the intimate con- 
nection between social morale and imperativistic ethics. 
Animal instinct is the foundation of all morality of impera- 
tives. In colonies of bees and ants social morale is nearly 
perfect. Reflection has not yet dawned and behavior is 
mechanized and nearly unvarying. The autonomous will 
is in the nervous mechanism of the animals. Among prim- 
itive men social morale again prevails. The customs of the 
tribe are obeyed. Children do not have to be punished. 
Young men and women do not have to be greatly admon- 
ished. Why? Because in constant intertribal warfare those 
people in whom internal discipline is not present have 
perished. The individuals of the group must act together, 


34 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


else they die. In our great modern nations social morale 
is found most perfect in time of war, when imperativistic 
ethics prevails. It is also present among people who are 
preparing for war or are threatened by war. In time of 
peace and security it fails, when reflective morality is 
preached in a flood of magazines and books, especially in 
books of fiction and on the screen and in the drama. 

But, in any social group, morale prevails in the smaller 
groups where imperativistic morality rules. In football 
teams it is nearly perfect. Players called from the game 
sometimes weep—but they obey. “Theirs not to reason 
why.” Headstrong sons and daughters will not listen to 
the admonitions of their parents, but readily submit to the 
discipline of their fraternity or sorority. The rules in a 
boys’ gang are obeyed, and obeyed not because they are 
reasonable but because they are rules. They are categori- 
cal imperatives. Fashions of all kinds are again categori- 
cal imperatives. There is no particular reason why you 
should not wear your straw hat before a given date but you 
don’t do it. Our daughters may disobey many of the ten 
commandments but not the commandment of the short 
dress and the bobbed hair. When the great steamer, the 
Titanic, on her maiden voyage westward, struck an iceberg 
in mid-ocean and went down, the men—statesmen, schol- 
ars, artists—helped the women and children into the scanty 
life-boats and themselves stood calmly on the deck of the 
sinking ship and died. Why? Just because such conduct 
is ordained. It is the proper thing to do. It is the moral- 
ity of imperatives, and it is the morality of imperatives 
rather than the morality of reflection that seems to bring 
results. 7 

There emerge from this discussion two truths: first, 
that discipline is needed; second, discipline comes from 
precisely the kind of morality which Kant preached. A cen- 
trifugal age like the present needs Kant and his morality. 





NEED OF IMPERATIVISTIC ETHICS 35 


Our world is obsessed by a group of new values, mostly 
of the centrifugal and expansive variety, very familiar to 
us, preached as they have been for one hundred and fifty 
years from every platform and pulpit, and bristling from 
all our State papers. They are Liberty, Equality, Oppor- 
tunity, Efficiency, Energy, Democracy, Organization, Sci- 
ence, Invention, and Discovery. We believe in these still 
—but the time has come in our modern crowded communi- 
ties when we must focus our attention upon another set 
of values of the integrating, centripetal variety, such as 
Respect for Law and Obedience to Law, Limitation of 
Desires, Temperance, Restraint, Discipline, Co-operation, 
Conservation of Racial Values and National Resources, 
and Education, for upon the practice of these virtues the 
very existence of society depends. The massing of popu- 
lations in cities, the disappearance of the frontier, and the 
rapid increase of population in almost all countries make 
the practice of these integrating virtues absolutely neces- 
sary. 

But now, of course, in answer to all this you may say 
that it is true enough that the world needs discipline. It 
needs an autonomous will; it needs either an angry God 
with his ten commandments graven on everlasting stone, 
or else some mighty magnet drawing and commanding 
the respect and obedience of men. But the world has lost 
its faith in an angry God and where shall we find the leader 
who will draw all men unto himself? Shall we turn back 
to Kant and accept his autonomous will? If it be true that 
Kant’s philosophy of duty and the categorical imperative 
is precisely the philosophy that a centrifugal age such as 
ours seems most to need, will this mere fact justify us in 
accepting the Kantian ethics? 

Before I go on to inquire whether in the light of the 
philosophy of the present we may still believe in the ethics 
of Kant, let me illustrate still further the need of some 


36 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


such system. It is complained that in our large cities, 
there is a serious break-down of moral standards in the 
relations of high school boys and girls. Indeed, it is not 
wholly confined to large cities. Conventional morality in 
Europe since the Great War has suffered a marked decline. 
There has been in this country a serious break-down in 
respect to obedience to the laws of the State, noticeable in 
the high percentage of crime as well as in the flagrant 
disregard of law in the smuggling and manufacture and 
sale of intoxicants in violation of our national laws. The 
perpetuity of our social order will depend upon respect for 
law, even if it does not depend, as I think it will, upon 
respect for the purity of the family, and respect for honor 
and integrity. In the face of a widespread violation of 
these laws, we do not know what will happen; but what 
may happen is gradual social dissolution, with political dis- 
order and bloodshed, with their accompanying poverty and 
distress, dirt and disease. 

Very well, what is the remedy? Education, perhaps you 
will say. Our young people must be instructed in the 
hygiene of sex, in the codes of honor, truthfulness, hon- 
esty, thrift, and the dignity of labor, and in the supreme 
importance of obedience to law; and it must be clearly ex- 
plained to them that unless these virtues are practiced the 
welfare or even the safety of society will be threatened. 
However, the best we can do for them by this method will 
be a hypothetical imperative. Jf you don’t do so and so, 
then such and such unhappy things will happen. But I 
think Kant was right about the hypothetical imperative. 
People do not really care so very much about consequences, 
especially if they be far in the future, and affect not them- 
selves but society. I wonder whether we can make people 
good in this way. Certainly education will do much and 
the necessity for a moral education could hardly be over- 
emphasized. But is it not true, as Kant so plainly saw, 


NEED OF IMPERATIVISTIC ETHICS 37 


that when people do right against their natural impulses, it 
is usually not from prudence but from loyalty—loyalty to 
some kind of authority, the authority of conscience, the 
authority of religion, the authority of habit, the authority 
of the group, the authority of custom, the authority of 
public opinion; the authority of fraternity, or union? 

One of the most widespread errors of the present time 
is the belief that our social and ethical problems are to be 
solved by political and economic reforms. The construc- 
tive work of the world at present is devoted to economic 
reform, not social reform, the assumption being that social 
evils will cure themselves, if the economic ills are done 
away. Only give everybody opportunity, leisure, freedom, 
and their rightful share of the world’s wealth and they 
will at once behave themselves. This fallacy is abroad 
everywhere, but it is fatal. One might even say that in 
proportion as our economic problems are solved, our social 
problems increase. Comforts, luxuries, wealth, leisure and 
freedom scattered generously among a hundred million 
people, whose average mental age is less than fourteen 
years, whose powers of self-control and restraint are un- 
cultivated and who have been educated in a school not of 
discipline but of self-expression, if not even of self-indulg- 

ence and insurgency, contribute not to social stability but 

_ to social decadence. 

Such, then, it seems to me, is the situation as regards 
the relation between social morale and imperativistic eth- 
ics. Kant’s ethical system works in practice—but what 
about its theory? Are we not faced with this depressing 
fact that the theory rests upon a whole set of ungrounded 
assumptions, while our modern evolutionary, biological, 
and psychological ethics rests upon well-established prin- 
ciples? I believe that such is not the case, but I cannot 
attempt in the few remaining paragraphs of my paper to 
vindicate this belief. J can only mention one or two tend- 


38 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


encies in the philosophy of the present which seem to give 
promise of a partial return to the Kantian position. And 
I may say further that I do not look for the vindication of 
the Kantian ethics in a revival of the older forms of ideal- 
ism or the absolutist philosophies, but rather in certain 
trends in the pluralistic, epigenetic, and pragmatic philoso- 
phy of the times. 

What then are some of the new thoughts which lend 
encouragement to the principles of the practical reason? I 
should say, first, the very prevalent tendency to interpret 
values, and among them moral values, as abiding realities 
in a universe no longer conceived exclusively in terms of 
physics and chemistry. No other thought in philosophical 
modernism is so significant to me as the hope that we may 
attribute full objective reality to matter and motion with- 
out conceding the whole universe to them. They are real, 
but so are many other things, such as space and time, or 
space-time, relations, logical principles, life and mind, and 
ethical and aesthetic values. In the doctrine of the reality 
of moral values—their absolute reality, if you must use 
this much abused term—the road is straightway opened 
for a revival of the Kantian ethics. Goodness is no longer 
to be interpreted in terms of desire, but desire in terms of 
the good. There is today, I believe, a very strong reaction 
against the view of Spinoza that things are good because 
we desire them, in favor of the view that we desire them 
because they are good. We are now coming to think that 
values are real and objective. We have been patient too 
long with the claim made by the disciples of naturalism 
that physical and chemical concepts have some sort of pre- 
rogative in the world of reality. The world as revealed to 
us in physics and chemistry is a true world, but not the 
whole world—nor even a fair sample of the whole world. 
From the science of ethics we may with equal right select 
entities which are as real and perhaps more representative 


NEED OF IMPERATIVISTIC ETHICS 39 


than those of physics. If this be true, ethics again aspires 
to the place of autonomy given it by Kant. There may be 
an absolute right, after all, and if so, it will speak with the 
voice of authority. If moral values are subsistent entities, 
we shall no longer have hypothetical imperatives exclu- 
sively, but categorical ones as well. Goodness and right- 
eousness will no longer be stepping-stones to some more 
real goal, such as happiness, but ends in themselves, like 
powerful magnets drawing all things to themselves. They 
will speak with authority because they are eternal values; 
and they will command our loyalty and allegiance because 
of their intrinsic worth, which the soul of man has power 
to discern. We are beginning to learn that desires are not 
ultimate or arbitrary states of mind that simply exist and 
do not have to account for themselves. This autonomy of 
desire, which has ruled for a time in many current ethical 
theories was quite as dogmatic as Kant’s autonomy of the 
will. As Mr, Laing says in his reeent Studies in Moral 
Problems, “The question of the morality of desire has be- 
come an objective one; it turns upon conditions and natural 
processes, not upon some inner or subjective force or 
tendency.” “Desire,” he says, “emerges from or super- 
venes on processes in which certain things or qualities 
have already come to have or to be values; and desire does 
not create that value but presupposes it” (p. 217). 

I believe that ethical philosophy will be much simplified 
if we accept the view that life is a value in itself, and that 
the conditions of life have come into being because they 
were indispensable to that end, and that mind and intelli- 
gence and consciousness, and social organization are val- 
ues, for which organic life was indispensable. Likewise 
righteousness and justice, love and co-operation, con- 
science and duty, beauty and goodness, are values in them- 
selves and at the same time indispensable conditions of 
other values. Thus we shall have the autonomy of values, 


40 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


which will approximate somewhat closely to the Kantian 
ethics with its exaltation of duty, obedience and reverence. 

Such an ethical system will come much nearer to imper- 
ativistic than to reflective morality. If, as Kant said, duty 
is a jewel shining by its own light, we may say that all 
these values are jewels shining by their own light. 

There are many tendencies in the philosophy of the 
present that seem in harmony with Kant’s practical phil- 
osophy. In one form or another the notion of a creative 
evolution in which freedom and spontaneity are expressed 
in the realization of higher and higher values widely pre- 
vails. We are learning that evolution is an epigenetic 
process, rather than strictly an evolution, successively real- 
izing life and mind and social organization and art, sci- 
ence, and philosophy. We may at least regard these as 
values, if we are not ready to regard them as goals. And 
even if they are not to be considered as values, there is at 
any rate a creative process at work in their appearance. 
There is, as Bergson thinks, some original aspiration of 
life, which finds fulfillment only in society. We are em- 
phasizing now the conative tendencies in organisms—im- 
pulse, striving, deep springs of action, which well up in 
our conscious life, suffused with emotional tone, not merely 
as desires and appetites, but as vague longings, aspirations 
and hopes, so that they become springs of progress as well 
as fountains of our love-life, our social life, our economic 
life. They are the power behind the throne in it all. 

And many of us are beginning to believe that the brain 
and indeed the muscles and bones and digestive organs 
are instruments of these “energy influences, seething and 
bubbling in the organism” and that the biological interests 
themselves are but parts of a universal cosmic force, which 
is a conative force, a life force, an organizing power, a 
common creative agency, an internal perfecting principle, 
an evolutionary urge. It is that primeval Effort which 


NEED OF IMPERATIVISTIC ETHICS 4] 


Hobhouse speaks of as the creator of gods and men. It 
is that Activity which Lloyd Morgan in his recent work 
on Emergent Evolution says we must posit at the begin- 
ning of evolution. It is that e/an vital which Ber gson finds 
at the source of life; it is the struggle for existence which 
Darwin used but never explained; it is craving; it is inter- 
est; it is hunger; it is aspiration. It is creative; it is spon- 
taneous; it is free; and, dare we say, it is moral. A wholly 
new set of categories is adopted by Professor Patten, in 
his Grand Strategy of Evolution, in explaining evolution. 
Egoism, altruism, and service are ultimate conceptions by 
which alone we can understand evolution. Mechanistic 
science furnishes us with no picture of a free creative 
source possessing moral attributes. It would appear that 
the idea expressed by the word “ought” is not a newcomer 
in the world, appearing when man first began to speak of 
duties. On the contrary, it belongs far back at the pri- 
meval source of things. Thus it appears that we are speak- 
ing after all of Kant’s noumenal will, only we are giving 
it modern names. Professor Starbuck, in a recent paper 
on the Kantian ethics, expresses the belief that there is 
no such chasm between the pure and the practical reason 
as Kant’s critics claim; that in all his works, from the be- 
ginning, Kant was feeling his way to the doctrine of the 
primacy of the will. Mr. H. S. Chamberlain in his work 
on Karit says: “If the categorical imperative would not 
ring in reason itself, as one of the fundamental facts out 
of which the Ego and the world arise, then the conception 
of morality would have no sense.” 

Possibly then we may arrive at the conception of the 
universe as moral, as the very expression of moral rather 
than of physical law. If so, there is still hope for that 
respect for the moral law and that reverence for duty upon 
which the salvation of society seems to depend. 

Gol W.2RATRICK, 

THE STATE UNIveErsity oF Iowa. 





te 
ak - a ‘ * : 
—  CuLturAL ENVIRONMENT OF THE PuILosopHy oF KANT 


—e ae > 


‘ 








THE CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF THE 
PHICOSORPEAY ORSRANT 


HE life of Kant coincided with the entire period of 

modern history in which the German people rose from 
the depths of decay to its third great classic era, and Ger- 
manic civilization regained its old place as one of the three 
greatest modern civilizations, beside the English and the 
Romance. Kant grew up in and worked through one phase 
after another of cultural progress, which developed with 
that astonishing acceleration characteristic of all great 
epochs, until in less than two generations it had brought 
the chief resources of material and spiritual life, of nature 
and mind, within the focus of one great synthetic concep- 
tion, which found its fullest and highest expression in the 
German classic era. And being, like the other minds of the 
first rank among his contemporaries, such as Lessing, 
Herder, Goethe, Schiller, and Frederick the Great, distin- 
guished by an extraordinary alertness and universality of 
interest, he sought to inform himself regarding all the im- 
portant intellectual and social movements of his age. 

The dominant position of his philosophy, its theoretical 
supremacy and abstractness, have created the appearance 
of a considerable isolation of his thought from the general 
cultural movements. In accounts, for instance, of Lessing, 
Herder, Schiller, Goethe, and Frederick the Great, it is cus- 
tomary to relate the ideas of each not merely to other ideas 
as such, but also to the whole of the cultural environments, 


46 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


in reciprocal contacts with which these ideas took form, 
and thus to add to specific theoretical interpretations the 
suggestive and corrective illumination of genetic connec- 
tions. In the accounts of Kant, on the other hand, theoreti- 
cal analysis preponderates to such a degree that the mental 
personality of Kant appears not as a genetic character but 
rather as almost another Ding-an-sich, placed on a cul- 
tural island. The terms of his philosophy, severed from 
most of their connotative relations to general cultural ori- 
gin and condition, are often reduced to a degree of tech- 
nical specificity, to a paucity of association and haggard 
sharpness of lineament, disconcerting to those who require 
the legitimate tests of non-speculative demonstration. In 
this formal withdrawnness lies the cause also of the great 
difficulty experienced by those who, by trying to interrelate 
the great movements in literature with those in philosophy, 
endeavor to deepen and enrich the comprehension of the 
genetic and essential unity of all culture. 

The following sketch, summary as it must be, has for 
its subjects both the more important general factors and 
the more salient literary expressions of the cultural en- 
vironment of the philosophy of Kant. 

The conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War had given 
the forms of peace to a country for the most part devas- 
tated. A whole generation had been destroyed. Vast 
districts were entirely uninhabited and had fallen back into 
wilderness. More than one-third of the population had 
perished. Most of the Baltic and North Sea ports, and 
the control of the navigation of the Rhine had been taken 
away by France and Sweden, and thus Germany’s foreign 
trade with the North, East, and West, especially with Rus- 
sia, Holland, and England, strangled. In the fifteenth 
century the cities of Germany had been the radiating cen- 
ters of the main routes of European commerce from the 
Levant, through the Mediterranean, through Italy, to the 





House 1N PRINZESSINSTRASSE WHERE KANT LIVED FROM 1783 
Untit His DEATH 





GARDEN VIEW OF KANT’S HOME IN PRINZESSINSTRASSE 





CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF PHILOSOPHY 47 


remainder of Europe and to England. Aeneas Sylvius, 
later Pope Pius II, who had traveled through Germany, 
has given in his book on Germany a vivid picture of the 
extraordinary wealth, culture, and greatness of German 
life. At that time commerce and industry had attained to 
a stage in which many modern methods of capitalism and 
organization were anticipated. The great merchant 
princes and financial leaders had the wide views of states- 
men. Wholesale methods of production; associations re- 
sembling modern stock companies and often winning the 
controlling positions of modern trusts; modern systems of 
credit, of financing vast enterprises; exchanges and trade 
agreements had been established. The burghers had been 
wealthy and had some share in the liberal outlook of men 
of the world, leisure for culture, and the enterprising and 
optimistic sense of political independence, by which periods 
of sound prosperity are distinguished. 

During the Thirty Years’ War all that magnificent 
structure of civilization had been buried under an ava- 
lanche of ruin. 

That war had also destroyed the last vestige of impe- 
rial control and unity. Pufendorf, the great jurist of the 
seventeenth century, who, following Grotius, tried to 
establish a modern international law on the basis of the 
“natural law” of Rationalism, characterized the empire as 
“wrregulare aliquod corpus et monstro simile’ (a non-de- 
script body resembling a monster). The empire had been 
broken up into hundreds of independent states, each ruled 
over by an irresponsible absolute prince, who aped the 
forms and extravagance of Louis XIV and kept his sub- 
jects impoverished by the taxation required to cover the 
lavish expense and pomp of his court and army. The 
importance of the central power enabled these princes to 
establish without hindrance the principle of the absolute 
monarchy borrowed from the Rot Soleil. The people be- 


48 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


came subjects; blind obedience, the highest virtue; unques- 
tioning submission to official authority, the only way of 
safety and happiness. The theory of divine grace and the 
“beschrankte Untertanenverstand” reached its highest de- 
velopment: “Ruh ist die erste Biirgerpflicht.’ The fibres 
of independence were shattered, civic responsibility, enter- 
prise, and initiative were pulverized into atomistic subject- 
isolation and inertia. Not only the burgher and farmer, 
but the petty nobility as well shared in this fate of civic 
devitalization and downward leveling. During the Thirty 
Years’ War and after, the knights had lost, through the 
new methods of warfare brought about by gunpowder, 
their military prestige, and with the general economic col- 
lapse and dislocation of methods of production much of 
their property. Many had become robbers, vagabonds, or 
soldiers of fortune; their economic and political power was 
gone. The only careers open to them were in the army or 
the bureaucracy, as the retainers of the absolute princes. 

The cities had been deprived of their power and wealth. 
With the barring of the great trade routes through Ger- 
many, and with the diversion of commerce to the Atlantic 
seaboard and England, their foreign trade was dead. In- 
ternal trade was paralyzed by the hundreds of obstruc- 
tions in the forms of taxes and imposts of every conceiv- 
able sort, collected at every one of the hundreds of state 
boundaries, at the gates of towns and cities. Universal 
stagnation famine prices, and a steady increase in poverty 
were the result. 

All the gain of the fifteenth century in the technique and 
progress of commerce, industry, and civic culture was lost. 
The enlightened burgher of that great age had become 
the timid, petty, anxious, impoverished Kleinbiirger. 
There was no vision. The mental horizon of the Klein- 
biirger at the turn of the seventeenth century was bounded 
by his parish, by what he could descry from the spire of 


CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF PHILOSOPHY 49 


his church. The mean ethics of a cowed poverty, brow- 
beaten by an.absolutistic and far from incorruptible official- 
dom, shut off from every avenue of escape to opportunity, 
pervaded like a fatal plague the civic life. 

The intellectual life was barren, and enslaved by rules. 
The few individual exceptions, of which one is of supreme, 
and two are of eminent, importance, appear as miracles. 
Bach, probably the greatest musician of all history, and 
Handel, founded modern music; and Leibniz introduced 
the conception of the dynamic individual as the primary 
factor of reality, into philosophy. In literature, there was 
one poet of original talent, Giinther, who by his inability 
to adjust himself to the conditions of conventional exist- 
ence, succumbed to a disordered life. Opitz and Gottsched, 
the two leading literary men, the one of the seventeenth, 
the other of the eighteenth century, were dominated by 
the formal rationalism of the French classic period, which 
in its insistence on the universality of its rules, on the sub- 
ordination of individual impulse to an aesthetic code, on 
submission of spontaneous emotion to the criteria of objec- 
tive truth and form, was the aesthetic pendant of political 
absolutism. French classicism, however, with all its form- 
alism and intellectual pedantry, had been at least vital- 
ized by a great efflorescence of national genius. It was a 
true historical expression of national genius. But the 
theory and practice of Opitz and Gottsched had no deep 
roots in national life. They were alien incrustrations hid- 
ing and suffocating the true nature of the German national 
genius. The rigid rules prescribed by Opitz and Gott- 
sched; the dreary imitations of works of French literature 
made and encouraged by Gottsched; even the sensible 
efforts of both to prune German literature of the barbarous 
crudities which had supervened in the wake of the Thirty 
Years’ War, and the energetic attempts to preserve the 
purity of the language threatened by the affectation of 


50 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


foreign words among the classes subject to the prestige 
of France in the cultural as well as the political life of the 
time; all these well-meant endeavors to lift German cul- 
tural life back upon a higher level, could not provide the 
avenues for the free flow of the richness and vitality slum- 
bering in the depths of the German mind. | 

Such were the conditions of the cultural environment 
into which Kant was born. Here and there slight im- 
provements of an individual and minor character had ap- 
peared. But the major factors in the general condition 
had not improved. The impotence of the central power 
was an irresistible temptation to the encroachments not 
only of the German sovereign princes but of foreign pow- 
ers as well. There was no central focus of vision, of ideal- 
ism, of ultimate purpose and reason-for-being, in which 
the German of that day could integrate his aspirations. 
There was for all the groping desires and ideal necessities 
no supreme national locus, which the individual man 
craves and without which he is intellectually and spirit- 
ually homeless and fruitless. The noble spirituality of the 
music of Bach is the successful effort of a supreme genius 
to raise from his own soul the cathedral of his spiritual 
home. But only a transcendent genius like Bach is capable 
of a real victory over actuality. The assertion of the abso- 
lute primacy of dynamic individuality by Leibniz can be 
understood, though hardly as a victory over the crushing 
tyranny of circumstance, yet as an escape into a world of 
ideals and a dimly—not “clearly and distinctly” !—prescient 
rebellion against the actual enslavement of the individual 
by the system of absolutism and poverty. It was not until 
the classic era, the time of Kant’s maturity, that the idea 
of Leibniz was transformed into a practical force. 

The ordinary “subject” had no resources to create his 
own spiritual world or to find an intellectual refuge among 
abstract substitutes for a substantial freedom. Huis circle 


CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF PHILOSOPHY tie | 


of life contracted more and more till only the most imme- 
diate and indispensable necessities held his attention. 
Everything beyond this narrow circle was beyond his con- 
trol, his desire, his concern, even his curiosity. It was 
dangerous, disturbing, and not contributory to the meagre 
resources of his existence. It added to the hazards of his 
precarious being. A life in which the expense of a penny 
becomes a matter of grave responsibility, begets an ethical 
code which demands that the circumference of activity, 
utterance, and interests be drawn in as closely as possible. 

This false atomistic type of individualism, this negative 
and barren ideal of independence, common in the eigh- 
teenth century, the result of the meanly necessitous condi- 
tion of life, is the essential characteristic of the Klein- 
biirger, the petty burgher, later nicknamed “philistine.” 
A part of this character was the mean utilitarianism by 
which the progress of true enlightenment was hampered. 
The anxious penny-wisdom, the hand-to-mouth pragmat- 
ism, the censoriousness and envy, the lack and hatred of 
vision, the spiteful enmity toward the gifted and the inde- 
pendent, the smug pride of commonness among equals to- 
gether with abject servility toward superiors, all came 
from the same economic-political source of strangled trade, 
poverty, and absolutism. 

During the childhood of Kant a gradual improvement 
began. About 1740, progress was definitely established. 
It continued until the disaster and collapse of the age of 
Napoleon. But a cowed mental condition deeply impressed 
through generations, is slow to adapt itself to larger cir- 
cumstances. The philistinism of 1740, even of 1787, lagged 
far behind the economic advance. It was too intimidated 
and constrained not to regard new resources, methods, 
and views with fear, suspicion, and the scorn of the un- 


quickened. 


52 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


The burgher of 1740 was less forceful and enterprising 
than the craft master of 1440. He was afraid to discount 
notes. He even demanded futile laws against discount- 
ing. The modern credit system made slow headway 
against the inbred, blind terror of debt. There was no im- 
pulse for association and codperation in enterprises. Mod- 
ern economic and industrial technique developed with 
extraordinary slowness. In the second part of Faust, com- 
pleted twenty-seven years after Kant’s death, even Goethe 
had not the vision to substitute the principle of organiza- 
tion for the makeshift of magic. Civic life throughout the 
eighteenth century did not succeed in freeing itself from 
the medieval artisan ideal of individual production. 

The retardation of the economic intelligence of the 
burgher has left a long and interesting trail in the litera- 
ture of Kant’s contemporaries. Die Abderiten, by Wie- 
land; Liuzse, by Voss; Hermann und Dorothea, by Goethe; 
Jean Paul’s novel, give a rich and varied picture of the 
meaner as well as the better aspects of the lives and minds 
of these burghers. Perhaps it is even more important to 
note the authors’ desire in all these works, with the excep- 
tion of the sharp satire of Die Abderiten, to idealize these 
worthy burghers, who are conceived almost as representa- 
tives of a modern Golden Age. The burgher, now well to 
do and capable, but still embodying the old artisan ethics 
and technique, is in the literature of this age the backbone 
of the social structure. He returns to a renewed though 
somewhat wistful embodiment during the middle of 
the nineteenth century in the novels of Raabe, one of the 
most important modern prose writers. 

The power of the territorial princes tended at first, 
through the greater returns from taxation, to increase. 
With the exception of a few, like the dukes of Weimar and 
Gotha, the prince of Meiningen, and some others, these 
absolute monarchs were interested in the empty formalities 


CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF PHILOSOPHY eae) 


of their court life and their little armies modeled after the 
pattern set by Louis XIV, and later by Frederick the 
Great. They lived lives wholly apart from the people. All 
the higher administrative and military posts were reserved 
for the nobility. 

The ancient upper class of burghers in the larger cities, 
acquired a more substantial prominence. Unfortunately, 
they also had as the result of absolutism and economic 
disorganization, developed an atomistic individualism of 
their own. They, too, formed an isolated group. They, 
like the nobles, kept aloof from the deeper currents of 
progress which tended to unite the productive forces in the 
German people. They led exclusive, self-centered lives, 
often given to foppishness, luxurious display, and frivol- 
ity, and wasting their mental powers in rococo artificiality 
and mock sentiment and refinement. The so-called ana- 
creontic poetry of the age, with its society-shepherds and 
shepherdesses, and its patch, powder, and fan-sentiment, 
represents the best—and often a charming—aspect of this 
life of sensitive, refined and gracious, but superficial and 
futile pastimes. 

The main cultural impulse had to come and did come 
from the burgher class, and throughout the development 
of the new age it bore intellectually, ethically, and aestheti- 
cally, the features of the burgher character. In those abso- 
lutistic states ruled by princes, most of whom were devoid 
of culture and ideas, there was only one outlet for the 
growing sense of importance, independence, and desire for 
extension of power springing from the increasing pros- 
perity of the burgher. That outlet was intellectual. In 
the culture of the mind alone the ambitious burgher of the 
age of the absolute prince, the police-state, the rigid social 
class-system, the fixed order of civic conduct, could find a 
refuge for individual freedom and ambition. The citizen 
assumed often almost incredible burdens to secure for his 


54 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


sons the best education to be had. The sons of burghers 
soon began to fill the learned professions and the higher 
offices in cities and states. Their example stimulated even 
the poorer classes who could not afford to send their sons 
to universities. As in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 
the people began to read with zeal. Journals and circulat- 
ing libraries multiplied. Cheap editions of the old Volks- 
biicher were sold in the markets by the market women. 
Goethe tells in Dichtung und Wahrheit of the importance 
of this popular literature during his childhood. A new 
intellectual vigor and initiative appeared in the cities which 
had been of old the birthplaces of German culture, as 
Strassburg and the cities of Northern Bavaria, Thuringia, 
Franconia, the Palatinate, Saxony. 

The new class of burgher officials pushing up from be- 
low into administration, however, did not reach the top. 
Even Frederick the Great would have no commoners in 
the highest positions. But the favored nobility had not the 
inner strength, even in its position of authority, to impress 
itself culturally upon the people. They were not like the 
nobles of England and France who by virtue of education, 
culture, large vision, and statesmanship were readily 
acknowledged as fitted for political rule. The majority of 
the German nobility of the later eighteenth century, giving 
their attention to cultivating their lands, hunting, attend- 
ing their princes at court, remained on the whole in an 
inferior condition of education or culture. There were, 
however, notable exceptions, as the Humboldts and 
Goethe’s friends in Weimar. 


; The educated sons of the burghers were the leaven of 
the new society. It was the burgher qualities of mind and 
character, refined and developed through education, which 
shaped the dominant collective personality of the latter 
part of the eighteenth century. 


CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF PHILOSOPHY ay 


The traditional morality, the burgher conscience, ex- 
panded to comprehend and do justice to the new conditions. 
But it retained its fibre and its character. It clung to its 
absolutism of individual responsibility, its particularism 
of self-determination. 

This conscience morality found its strongest abode and 
bulwark in the Prussian state during the rule of Frederick 
William I and Frederick the Great. The latter created 
the final liberalized form of absolute monarchy, which ulti- 
mately led to the constitutional system. He represented 
“Enlightened Absolutism” at its best. He called himself 
the “first servant” of the state, implying that he was sub- 
ject to the same laws of duty and responsibility as his 
subjects. It can be easily pointed out that an “absolutely 
sovereign servant” is politically a singular type of serv- 
ant. Nevertheless, Frederick’s insistence on the civic re- 
sponsibility of the ruler is epoch-making, if it is compared 
with the “/’Etat c’est Moz’ of the older absolutism. It is 
the enactment into the constitution of his state of the essen- 
tial code of morality, characteristic of the enlightened 
burgher of the later eighteenth century. Ethically, the his- 
torical German burgher state was reborn in the Prussian 
state of Frederick. 

Frederick did not, as is often said, create the bureau- 
cratic state. On the contrary, he greatly reduced the 
bureaucracy. He eliminated the unfit, the corrupt, and 
the superfluous officials; he simplified the machinery of 
government; and he exempted matters of personal con- 
science, especially religion, from official interference. A 
comparison will emphasize the reduction of the bureau- 
cracy under Frederick. In Heidelberg, in the sixteenth 
century, one-fourth of the tax-payers were paid officials. 

Discipline, obedience to law, absolute conscience, were 
the principal virtues of Frederick’s state. That state was 


56 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


the supreme official representative, the constitutional agent 
of the “Practical Reason.” 

We thus comprehend the great political, social, and in- 
tellectual forces which bound together the development of 
the character of the German burgher, the ethical concep- 
tion embodied in the state of Frederick the Great, and 
Kant’s categorical imperative, into an historic unity. 


CONTRARY TENDENCIES 


One may characterize the development thus far de- 
scribed, as the dominant economic-political part of the cul- 
tural environment of the age of Kant. Simultaneously 
with it, however, there arose out of the growing desire 
for freedom, an opposite current of ideas. This move- 
ment, exhibiting a bewildering variety, richness, and com- 
plexity of factors, was held together by a fundamental 
unity of intention, which, obscure at first, attained finally, 
in the work of Herder and Goethe, to clarity and compre- 
hensive definition as the naturalistic doctrine of the pri- 
macy of spontaneous individual impulse. 

This movement is variously described as emotionalism, 
or subjectivism, or romanticism, or naturalism. In the 
present very brief summary, it will be characterized as 
Vitalistic Naturalism. An essential part of the definition 
of this vitalistic naturalism is its conscious, complete nega- 
tion of the fundamental assumptions of rationalism, espe- 
cially of the primacy of reason, of the separate entity of 
reason as such, and of the identity of the essence of reality 
with the content of ratiocinative (“clear and distinct”) 
reflection upon “empirical” or sense data. 

In its positive aspect vitalistic naturalism combined all 
the various historical reactions against rationalism, from 
Locke to Herder and beyond. It included Locke’s theory 


CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF PHILOSOPHY a 


of the primacy of sense perception as the source of the con- 
tents of the mind, and all the later developments of sensual- 
ism, or sense-ism; the psychological conclusions drawn by 
the leading physiologists of the late seventeenth and the 
early eighteenth century, also the more cautious associa- 
tionistic theories of Hartley and Priestley according to 
which the mind was regarded as essentially the product 
of the mechanism of the physiology of the nerves; the 
theory of sensibilism, or Gefiihl, according to which not 
reason but inner feeling holds the primary place in men- 
tal processes, represented among a large number of writ- 
ers by Shaftesbury, Rousseau, Hamann, and by many 
English, French, German, Swiss writers on aesthetic the- 
ory; mysticism, which is essentially the religious form of 
the theory of sensibilism; German Romanticism in its 
proper sense, in which the individual inner feeling was 
singled out as the sole source of all reality: “Gefiihl ist 
Alles” ; and finally a variety of more or less vague notions 
concerning the cognitive functions of feeling, which ap- 
peared in the writings of the more popular philosophers, 
among whom Mendelssohn and Jacobi are prominent.* To 
these movements were joined ideas derived from Giordano 
Bruno’s cosmic vitalism, the vitalism of Leibniz’s monad- 
ology, and the powerful vitalistic trend revealed in the 
works of many of the leading physiologists of the later 
eighteenth century, especially of Haller, on whose physi- 
ology Herder based his psychology. 

This vast and complex variety of conceptions was uni- 
fied and harmonized by Herder. 

Specific personality, the given individual, is according 
to Herder the primary integral factor of reality. Herder 
did not consider this individual as an absolute, as did the 
ideologues who regarded the individual as an embodiment 


1 For a more detailed account of these movements, see the present writer’s 
study, The Fundamental Ideas in MHerder’s Thought, No VI, Modern 
Philology, November, 1923, Vol. XXI, pp. 113-132. 


58 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


of Reason, or the naturalists of the school of Rousseau, 
whose mythical ideal, the natural man, was a total of in- 
stinctive perfection proceeding directly from the hand of 
the Creator; but as a relative being produced by a gradual 
biological and cultural development of the organic union 
of a primary spiritual principle with a physical principle 
in reciprocal formative relation to all the mechanical 
and spiritual factors of environment. The human indi- 
vidual, according to Herder, is the latest term in an end- 
less, not necessarily ascending, series of evolution. This 
individual acts in the integral unity of all his powers. If, 
Herder says in one passage, a man could perform a sin- 
gle act identical in all its essential relations with 
that of an animal, say a lion, he would thereby cease to 
be a man. Reason is only one of the functions of person- 
ality; it is not superior to, it is not even primarily distinct 
from, any other faculty. Even the will is only one of the 
integral functions of personality; it is not primarily sepa- 
rate. There is no reason which is not also will, judgment, 
imagination, memory, sense perception. Reality, aesthetics, 
ethics, or to use the fundamental terms taken by Kant 
from the naturalistic psychology, namely, Erkennen, 
Empfinden, Wollen, are according to Herder not subject 
to the special criteria inherent in distinct faculties, such 
as theoretic reason, judgment, practical reason, but to 
criteria derived from the total organic nature of personality. 

To the essentials of this view Goethe adhered through- 
out his intellectual development. Goethe differed from 
Herder chiefly in emphasizing the deductive principle of 
the vitalistic totality, the “zusammenbrennende, zusam- 
mentreffende Gange” of Wilhelm Meister, far more than 
Herder’s requirement of inductive demonstration would 
allow. We shall see presently that Goethe tried to find in 
his synthetic totalism an essential identity with Kant’s 
theoretic reason. 


CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF PHILOSOPHY 59 


Herder’s synthesis involved a theory of reality, epistem- 
ology, and psychology, fundamentally opposed to that of 
rationalism. The present survey is concerned with it not in 
its theoretical bearings, but only as one of the principal 
factors in the cultural environment of Kant’s philosophy. 

The characteristic aspects of this new tendency are 
exhibited in their most salient forms in the aesthetic theo- 
ries and in the conceptions of the motives of conduct 
embodied in the representative works of literature of the 
last generation of the eighteenth century. 


AESTHETIC THEORY 


The theory of beauty of the French classic period, that 
is, of the older rationalism, had been formed by Boileau. 
Imitation of nature, again proclaimed in the Renaissance 
as the aim of art, was interpreted by Boileau as imitation 
of the ideas of Reason, the “light of nature.” ‘Nothing is 
beautiful except the true.” Since, however, reason, which 
proceeds in accordance with “absolute, universal and 
necessary” rules, is the ultimate standard of the true, it 
follows that the rules of beauty and taste also must be 
“absolute, universal, and necessary.”’ This theory, which 
left little room for individuality, governed, in the common- 
place form into which it had been cast by Gottsched, Ger- 
man literary practice until about the time that Kant en- 
tered the university. 

Soon, however, the classic French theory, which had 
been considerably weakened by Batteux, who substituted 
the term “beautiful nature” for Boileau’s “true nature’ 
as the standard of beauty, thereby begging the whole ques- 
tion, found itself confronted with opposition arising from 
two quarters. Bodmer and Breitinger, two German-Swiss 
writers, followers partly of the British literary weeklies, 


60 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


and partly of Baumgarten, the author of Aesthetica and 
originator of that term, who had developed Leibniz’s con- 
ception of the highest classes of “obscure and confused” 
monads into the objects of artistic expression, proposed 
the theory of Naturwiichsigkeit, native spontaneous in- 
dividuality, as the standard of beauty. 

The movement of sense-ism, including emotionalism, de- 
veloped most fully in France, especially by Dubos, Con- 
dillac, and Diderot,’ endeavored to base the definition of 
art, the distinctions between the different forms of art, 
the proper objects of artistic “imitation” and expression, 
and the standards of beauty and rules of technique upon 
differences of function between the senses. Lessing’s the- 
ory that literature, pertaining to the sense of hearing, 
should embody in its composition the principle of succes- 
sion, and the graphic arts, pertaining to sight, the princi- 
ple of simultaneity, was derived from Diderot’s Letter on 
the Deaf and Dumb. 

Lessing, in his Laokoon, tried to save the rationalistic 
theory by combining it with the psychology of sense-ism. 
But his rationalism was not that of French classicism. He 
went back to Aristotle, and tried to substitute the latter’s 
conceptions of imitation, truth, and artistic illusion, of the 
unities and style, and above all of characterization and 
motivation, for those of Boileau and the French classic 
poets. The fundamental rationalistic assumption, how- 
ever, that art “imitates” abstract ideas, that, for instance, 
the gods of Homer are personified abstractions, remained 
in Lessing’s theory. 

Herder applied his principle of the organic unity of per- 
sonality to all these problems. In his first Kritisches Wald- 
chen, beginning with a conclusive criticism of Lessing’s 
theories, he showed that beauty and technique are not 


2See for a full investigation of this development, Malcolm H. Dewey, 
Herder’s Relation to the Aesthetic Theory of the Eighteenth Century, Univer- 
sity of Chicago Dissertation, 1920 (The University of Chicago Libraries). 


CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF PHILOSOPHY 61 


forms of abstract truth or universal rules of “reason,” in 
the technical sense; that no special faculties or types of 
perception are the determining factors in art; but that all 
art is expression of specific personality, and that the con- 
ceptions of beauty and technique are primarily conceptions 
of values and characteristics of personality. 

In this theory also, Goethe followed Herder for twenty- 
five years, until, in the middle of the nineties, he came un- 
der the influence of Schiller’s theories, derived from Kant. 


LITERARY MOTIVATION 


The system of motivation inherent in vitalistic natural- 
ism is illustrated in a succession of some of Goethe’s great- 
est works, particularly Werther’s Leiden, the Urfaust, 
or original version of Faust written before his departure 
for Weimar, 1775; and the first version of Wilhelm Meis- 
ter, written about ten years later. While rationalism inter- 
prets motives of conduct as conscious, fundamentally free 
and responsible decisions, naturalism conceives of them 
as obscure impulses, as motions subject to the push of cir- 
cumstances, as actions of mysterious inner, personal pow- 
ers, often, and especially by Goethe, named “daemonic.”’ 
A vitalistic fate, regarded generally as benevolent, holds, 
as it were, the reins over the career of each, and especially 
of the gifted individual, the genius. Herder never accepted 
this prone fatalism, nor this equally prone optimism. He 
substituted for the passive, naturalistic conception of im- 
pulse the active conception of ethical spontaneity and re- 
sponsibility inherent in his genetic theory of personality. 
Goethe began, soon after his arrival in Weimar, to develop, 
as is attested by his [phigenie and Tasso, a conception of 
motives of conduct and conscience-morality, which.is con- 
sciously akin to the ethics of Platonism and Stoicism and 


62 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


not related to the philosophy of Kant. Throughout this 
period, which lasted until the beginning of his intimacy 
with Schiller, Goethe persisted in paralleling the Platonic- 
Stoic type of motivation with a further elaboration, espe- 
cially in Wilhelm Meister, of the naturalistic impulse- 
morality. Both his belief in impulse-morality and his 
optimism regarding it found classic expression in his 
Spruch; 
“Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunklen Drange 
Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst.” 


His later revision of Wilhelm Meister and his additions 
to the first part of Faust, made after 1795, when he had 
come into contact with Kant’s Critique of the Practical 
Reason, embodied a very interesting change in ethical 
orientation. 

There was comparatively little practical danger in the 
theory of impulse-ethics, as long as it was held by men of 
balanced characters, like Herder and Goethe. But that 
theory produced very serious and disturbing results among 
many of the younger and less gifted men of that genera- 
tion. A movement, which named itself the “Storm-and- 
Stress,’ sprang up in which all the familiar consequences 
of emancipation from reasoned and accepted principles of 
conduct developed in their most tasteless, crude, and soci- 
ally disturbing forms. Both Herder and Goethe reacted 
severely against these extravagances, and there is little 
doubt that some of the conservative tendencies appearing 
early in Goethe’s view of life were intensified by his aver- 
sion to the turbulence and callow conceit of the Storm and 
Stress. Is it altogether unlikely that Kant was some- 
what influenced by these conditions, of which he cannot 
have been unaware among his students, in the rigorous ex- 
clusion of impulse from moral conduct, an exclusion which 
proved too severe even to one of his most devoted follow- 


CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF PHILOSOPHY 63 


ers, Schiller? And is it unlikely that the Prussian govern- 
ment was moved partly by the political and social dangers 
inherent in a movement of extreme naturalism, to encour- 
age extensive migration of students to the university in 
which Kant taught the absolute rule of duty? 


REACTIONS OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF KANT 
ON ITS ENVIRONMENT 


The most important immediate influence of the philos- 
ophy of Kant appeared in aesthetic theory. Goethe was 
much interested in the Critique of Judgment. He praised 
particularly the emphasis laid by Kant on disinterested- 
ness as the essential character of aesthetic purposiveness. 
The idea as such was not new to him. He had frequently 
asserted the requirement of Zwecklosigkeit, both in art 
and in science, in opposition to the naive utilitarianism of 
the popular philosophy. He had found confirmation of it 
in the Ethics of Spinoza, which he had read in the middle 
eighties. Now, with Kant’s support, he regarded the ques- 
tion of purpose as settled. 

He was also pleased with Kant’s confirmation of his own 
distinction between nature and art. But beyond that, his 
and Kant’s conclusions diverged. Goethe, in accordance 
with his fundamental view of the essential unity of all life, 
used the distinction between nature and art, which in 
Kant’s philosophy was essential, as a starting point for an 
ultimate harmonious synthesis of the two. This monistic 
tendency is revealed in its most characteristic aspects in 
the combination of the rationalistic with the naturalistic 
principle of motivation worked into the second and final 
version of Wilhelm Meister. It found its final theoretical 
expression in Natur und Kunst, a sonnet written by Goethe 


64 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


in 1802, which, because it sums up the essence of the classic 
creed of “freedom within law” held in common by Goethe 
and Schiller, should be quoted: 


NATUR UND KUNST 


Natur und Kunst, sie scheinen sich zu fliehen, 
Und haben sich, eh man es denkt, gefunden; 
Der Widerwille ist auch mir geschwunden, 

Und beide scheinen gleich mich anzuziehen. 

Es gilt wohl nur ein redliches Bemiihen! 

Und wenn wir erst in abgemessnen Stunden 
Mit Geist und Fleiss uns an die Kunst gebunden, 
Mag frei Natur im Herzen wieder gliihen. 

So ist’s mit aller Bildung auch beschaffen; 
Vergebens werden ungebundne Geister 

Nach der Vollendung reiner Hohe streben. 

Wer Grosses will, muss sich zusammenraffen: 
In der Beschrankung zeigt sich erst der Meister, 
Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben. 


Schiller accepted Kant’s distinction between the beautiful, 
as a universal, and the agreeable, as a personal, feeling of 
disinterested pleasure. Kant’s “pure pleasure” in the im- 
aginative intuition became in Schiller’s philosophy, most 
adequately expressed in his aesthetic poems, especially 
Das Ideal und das Leben, the selfless contemplation of the 
“reine Formen.” The freedom of the aesthetic life from 
the pressure of good and evil, and from the seriousness otf 
responsible activity, characterized by Kant as the play of 
the phenomena of the imagination, became the root of 
Schiller’s theory of the play-impulse as the source of art. 


In Kant’s ethical doctrine, both Goethe and Schiller 
accepted the rejection of ulterior purposes, especially those 
of eudaemonism and utility. But they could not accept 
the rigorous exclusion of impulse from moral conduct and 
the doctrine of the “radical evil.’ Yet both these Kantian 
doctrines were responsible for the introduction of some of 


the most important additions to the two greatest works 
of Goethe. 


CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF PHILOSOPHY 65 


In the original version of Wilhelm Meister the motiva- 
tion of the leading character is purely naturalistic. Wil- 
helm is led by impulse and circumstance. He has a good 
will, but never takes the initiative, and he never compels 
circumstance or his own action. He trusts that fate will 
turn everything toward his inward and outward improve- 
ment. The first version, written in the middle of the eigh- 
ties, received the title, Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mis- 
sion. Goethe at the time regarded the story as finished. But 
in 1794, at the beginning of his friendship with Schiller 
and acquaintance with the philosophy of Kant, he again 
took up the story and added what is now the second half 
of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. In its present form 
the novel reveals two fundamental changes, one of which 
is clearly an effort to harmonize the motivation with the 
essentials of the classic ethic-aesthetic ideal of “freedom,” 
i. e., individual choice within law, based chiefly on Kant’s 
ethics; and the second is an effort to transcend the Kantian 
dualism of the moral law and nature, or impulse, by a new 
synthesis, based on Herder’s and Goethe’s conception of 
the integral organic unity of the mental and physical 
powers. 

In the first part of the final version, since it was impos- 
sible, without destroying the structure of the whole, to 
transform it, Goethe left the principle of impulse-motiva- 
tion intact. But he added, at various crucial periods in 
Wilhelm’s life, a succession of “unknown” characters who 
argue the ethics of ethic-aesthetic freedom and initiative 
against Wilhelm’s fatalistic proneness. These unknown 
conscience-moralists are later, in the second part, intro- 
duced as members of a secret society, which has been 
anonymously supervising Wilhelm’s career, and now initi- 
ates him as a member. He receives his apprentice’s dip- 
loma, which contains aphoristic instructions, the general 
trend of which is toward a synthesis of impulse and delib- 


66 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


erate purposive judgment. Schiller, to whom Goethe com- 
municated the manuscript for suggestions, was, however, 
not satisfied. He requested another, concluding chapter, in 
which the ethical aspect of conduct would be more fully rep- 
resented. Goethe followed his advice and wrote the eighth 
book, the book of Natalie, the ideal woman won by Wil- 
helm. Natalie embodies the complete harmonious com- 
bination of instinct and conscious choice, the supreme 
stage of conduct, in which the moral law becomes con- 
scious impulse. Some of the philosophical considerations 
underlying this harmonization of nature and ethical will 
are expressed in Schiller’s argument on the three ages of 
civilization in his essay On the Naive and the Sentimental, 
written soon after, and in his Letters on the Aesthetic Edu- 
cation of Man. Schiller, dissatisfied with Rousseau’s be- 
lief in the fall of Man, through the sin of civilization, from 
the instinctive perfection of the “Golden Age,” added a 
theory of a final age of ideal being. His three stages of 
man were: original instinctive perfection, internal division 
through critical self-consciousness, and a final consciously 
natural harmony of all the powers of man through aes- 
thetic culture. Goethe rejected the myth of the Golden 
Age. He regarded the harmonious unity of life as the 
essence and goal of civilization. 

Goethe’s monistic impulse to transcend all opposites in 
an ultimate unity was decisive also in his completion of 
the first part of Faust. In the original version, the Urfaust, 
written before 1775, the motivation of Faust was purely 
naturalistic. Faust desired to understand the central unity 
of nature, vitalistically symbolized in the macrocosm and 
the microcosm. But in the Urfaust, Faust is hardly the 
principal figure. He is little developed. The principal 
part of the action, of the motivation, and of the pathos and 
human significance is the tragedy of Margarete. But in 
the final version the focus is shifted. Faust now is the 


CULTURAL ENVIRONMENT OF PHILOSOPHY 67 


principal figure. Margarete is an incident in the varied 
career determined by Faust’s “dunkle Drang.” The pri- 
mary naturalistic impulse acquires now an ethical end; 
Faust’s dramatic conflict becomes the sum of the active 
relations of the principles of good and evil. Goethe re- 
jected Kant’s theory of absolute, primary evil. Following 
the optimistic conception of evil as an agent of the prin- 
ciple of good, found already in Jakob Boehme and in Leib- 
niz, he developed Mephistopheles into the unwilling serv- 
ant of God. The original tragedy of impulse and infanticide 
becomes the drama of the ultimate goal of man amid the 
conflict between desire of knowledge, hunger for the hap- 
piness of the senses, and aspiration toward an ethical life. 

The ultimate monistic synthesis of life was Goethe’s 
supreme aim. His desire for harmonization was so great 
and persistent, that in 1817, thirteen years after Kant’s 
death, in his essay on Anschauende Urteilskraft (Intuitive 
Judgment), he asserted an essential identity of his own 
intuitive conception of the unity of all things, which is 
“regulative” in a manner similar to Kant’s theoretic rea- 
son in relation to the “ideas,” with that reason in its proc- 
ess of “descending from an intuition of a whole to par- 
ticulars.” 


From the timid, narrow, constrained Kleinbirger, 
characteristic of the environment of the childhood of Kant, 
to Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, and Frederick the 
Great, the contemporaries of his mature work, the distance 
is great both in time and in cultural degree. We have been 
obliged to travel this distance in seven-league boots, as 
it were, alighting for brief moments only on some of the 
most salient and characteristic points in the vast scene of 
the intellectual life of the eighteenth century. We have 
tried to gain a rapid view of the two complex develop- 
ments of conditions and ideas, now moving along with 


68 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


Kant’s thought, supporting and following it, now clashing 
with it, diverging, and again converging. We have had, 
now and then, glimpses of the marvelous fertility of fun- 
damental ideas, by virtue of which they acquire new life, 
new meanings, and new powers and avenues of germina- 
tion from every contact, whether sympathetic or antago- 
nistic. Both the collaboration and the conflict of ideas are 
endless; and the more fundamental a philosophy, the more 
it ultimately profits by its conflicts as well as its alliances. 

It is the fundamental character of the philosophy of 
Kant rather than specific theoretical or practical relations, 
which not only justifies but demands a survey of the prin- 
cipal factors in his cultural environment. On April 11, 
1827, twenty-three years after Kant’s death, Goethe said 
to Eckermann: “Kant is without any doubt the best of all 
the modern philosophers. He is the one whose teaching is 
still effective and has penetrated most deeply into our Ger: 
man culture.” If Goethe’s judgment is true—and there is 
no reason to doubt it—Kant holds his position of fruitful 
eminence not only as a technician of philosophy, but as an 
interpreter and a moulder of the cultural life of the Ger- 
man people during the last two centuries. 


MARTIN SCHUTZE. 
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. 


KANT, THE SEMINAL THINKER 








KANT THE SEMINAL THINKER: 


ANT’S commanding position and historical signifi- 
cance in the development of modern philosophy are 
not due to the finality of any of his principal conclusions; 
but rather to the immense impetus which he gave to phil- 
osophy in its several main fields. By his thoroughgoing 
reconsideration of the basic problems of philosophy—The 
Problem of the Nature of Existence, The Problem of Val- 
ues, and the Problem of the Relation of Existence and Val- 
ues—he cleared the ground and sowed the seeds of fresh 
constructive work. 

European philosophy had reached a deadlock. The two 
main currents of modern philosophy had run themselves 
out. Philosophy must find a new vital spring and a new 
direction of movement. It found these through Kant. 

The outcome of British psychological empiricism was 
subjectivistic individualism, and a scepticism scarcely dis- 
tinguishable from illusionism. If all knowledge, so-called, 
arises, one knows not how, from one knows not where, and 
consists merely of associational ties or customary sequences 
of ideas passively formed between sense impressions in an 
inert individual mind, objective science is unaccounted for. 
If knowledge be nothing more than a bundle of habits, 
blindly arising in the individual mind and if the mind in 
turn be nothing more than the passive stage on which 
sense impressions mysteriously appear, form connections 
and disappear, leaving faint footprints in the mental dust, 
mathematics becomes merely a set of symbols for relations 


Fos IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


among the individual subject’s ideas, physical science be- 
comes simply a name for the more persistent ways in 
which the concrete atomic contents of the individual sub- 
ject’s mind are connected. The individual mind is shut up 
within its own skin. Indeed the mind and its skin are 
nothing but more or less shifting contours in the acciden- 
tal procession of impressions and their copies. The logical 
outcome of Humian empiricism is a solipsism in which not 
even the lonely self has any definite and persisting nature. 
Kant never doubted the objectivity of physical science; 
never doubted that, in physics, there are universally valid 
and precisely definable principles. These involve the appli- 
cation of mathematics to the sense world. Kant, therefore, 
rejects psychological individualism. 

The philosophy of Leibniz escaped subjectivism by cut- 
ting the Gordian knot and affirming dogmatically that all 
knowledge is merely the explication, by rational analysis, 
of what is implicated or rolled up in the individual mind 
or monad. Every monad contains implicitly in its own be- 
ing all the relations which make up the universal system 
of reality. All that the monad needs to do is to spin physi- 
cal science and metaphysics out of its own inwards. Sense 
perception has a very dubious status in the Leibnizian phil- 
osophy. It is true this speaks of “truths of fact.”’ But, strictly 
speaking, nothing gets into the monad from without. 
Therefore, since sense-experience can be only the first dim 
stage in the monad’s process of coming to reflective self- 
consciousness, all the truths that science discovers are 
already prefigured in the monad’s subconscious life. All 
knowledge is the result of sheer analysis of what is vir- 
tually present from the outset. Science is excogitated by 
the individual monad in accordance with the logical laws 
of identity and sufficient reason. There is really no place 
for a physical world in the Leibnizian system. One does 
not see how there is any place for other monads than one’s 


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IMMANUEL KANT 


(After an Original Painting in the City Museum, Koenigsberg ) 


KANT, THE SEMINAL THINKER 7/4! 


self. The Leibnizian philosophy, in its logical outcome, is 
perilously close to the Humian. 

Such is the deadlock or dilemma which Kant faces. If 
the individual subject’s own mental processes constitute 
all there is to knowledge then there is no objective science. 
If science be the necessary analytical explication of the 
contents of a monad which reflects the universe, there is 
no physical world and there is no ground for real inter- 
course between the monads. 

Now Kant assumed that there is a physical world, 
accessible to a plurality of selves, and that the mind makes 
judgments that are valid for all similarly constituted and 
situated minds. Upon the occasion of sensory stimulations 
there are synthetic judgments, that is judgments in which 
the predicate adds to one’s knowledge of the subject, which 
are not passively derived copies of sensory stimuli. Sci- 
ence, meaning thereby a system of objectively valid truths 
in regard to nature, is the result of the activity of a prin- 
ciple of intellectual synthesis which organizes and inter- 
prets the data supplied through the senses. The sense 
manifold gives the matter of knowledge. As such, it has 
no separate existence. It does not consist of percepts and 
images. These have already been formed by acts of syn- 
thesis out of the given stimuli. Experience is always, in 
some degree, formed or ordered. For science two things 
are requisite: (1) Sensory stimulations. (11) The syn- 
thetic activity of thought. The latter is a priori, not in the 
psychological sense but in the sense that the various forms 
of intellectual synthesis—space, time, and the categories— 
are modes of the activity of the universal principle of syn- 
thesis as it functions in all finite thinkers. The transcen- 
dental ego is not your or my empirical ego. It is the uni- 
versal principle of synthesis which thinks in all of us inso- 
far as we think objectively. 


74 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


The mind and its objects are correlative. If we use the 
term “subject”? not for the individual self but for the uni- 
versal Knower, then Kant’s conclusion is that, since the 
Knower and the objects known are strictly correlative, the 
Knower is not an object of knowledge. Otherwise it could 
not be the synthetic activity presupposed in all knowing. 
The objects could not be constituted, since the sense mani- 
fold would not appear as a system of related existents, 
without the Knower. A recognition of the existence of a 
system of objects of knowledge presupposes the synthetic 
principle of activity which is never an object. Experience 
is the complex product of the intercourse of the ego with 
an unknown reality which appears in partial and fragmen- 
tary form as the realm of phenomena. 

Kant’s famous distinction of phenomena and noumena 
has been much misunderstood. Kant is himself largely 
responsible. There are two chief alternative interpreta- 
tions. (1) Kant, in spite of his heroic efforts, was a sub- 
jective idealist, an inconsistent mixture of Hume and Leib- 
niz. (11) The distinction is not between phenomena as 
subjective experiences and noumena as a plurality of ob- 
jects unknown but in one-one correspondence with phe- 
nomenal objects. Then phenomena or appearances 
(Erscheinung is the word which Kant nearly always uses) 
are the partial expressions, known to us, of the Real, which 
is a Systematic Totality thinkable as the Ideal Object of 
knowledge, but not knowable in its concrete and harmoni- 
ous wholeness. Then phenomenal knowledge, partial 
though it must always be, is continuous with the totality 
of the Real. 

I take it the latter is the true interpretation. The thing- 
in-itself or noumenal order is the limiting concept of an 
ideal totality or systematic whole of experience. This ideal 
totality, in Kant’s theory of knowledge, has no constitutive 
value. It does not enable us to predict just what and how 


KANT, THE SEMINAL THINKER + 


we shall experience. For the data of knowledge we must 
receptively wait upon sensory stimuli. But the ideal of a 
systematic and complete unity of experience, which is iden- 
tical with the World-Ground, is the spur and guide by 
which we are led to aim at ever more comprehensivenes; 
and coherence in the interpretation of the sensory data. 
We know phenomenally; not because our knowledge is 
illusory but because it is fragmentary, partial, never wholly 
coherent and far from comprehensive. Scientifically we 
know the conditioned or relative and its transcendental im- 
plicates. But the very presuppositions, the transcendental 
implicates of knowledge point us towards the Ideal Object 
which impels us and guides us in the quest for ever more 
adequate comprehensiveness and coherence. We seek to 
connect all the phenomena of mind as if there were an abid- 
ing principle of personal identity. We seek to connect the 
phenomena of physical matter as if they all belonged to a 
complete system or community of causal relations. We 
seek to interpret selves and nature in their inter-relations 
as if they were complementary expressions of a supreme 
and self-sufficient world-ground—“a self-subsistent, pri- 
meval and creative reason in relation to which we so em- 
ploy our reason in the field of experience, as if all objects 
drew their origin from that archetype of all reason.” * 
Thus the idea of God is “nothing more than a demand 
upon reason that it shall regulate the connection which it 
and its subordinate faculties introduce into the phenomena 
of the world by principles of systematic unity, and conse- 
quently, that it shall regard all phenomena as originating 
from one all-embracing being.” * Thus “the hypothesis of 
a supreme intelligence, sole cause of the universe, is always 
of the greatest service to reason.” The Idea of a sys- 
tematic unity in nature is the ideal ground of the consist- 


1 areas translation of the Critique of Pure Reason, p. 412; Adickes’ 
ed., p. 529. 
2 Meikeljohn, p. 420; Adickes, p. 538. 


76 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


ent and harmonious exercise of reason.* Thus the nou- 
menon is problematical. It contains no contradiction and 
is a limiting concept for the sensuous. Its objective reality 
is ideal. It cannot be cognized. 

The first conception of the relation of phenomena and 
noumena has much plausibility if one consider the Trans- 
cendental Analytic alone and especially in the first edition. 
There is much matter in the Analytic and indeed in the 
entire first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason which, if 
taken by itself, would justify the conclusion that Kant did 
not emancipate his theory of knowledge from a subjectiv- 
ism for which the empirical world as known is but an or- 
derly series of representations of unknowable realities 
(things-in-themselves ). 

On the other hand, the prevailing spirit of the Trans- 
cendental Dialectic and especially of the Appendix in the 
second edition points to the conclusion that Kant finally 
developed a position in which the relation of phenomena 
to noumena is that of the Partial and Conditioned to the 
Unconditioned and systematic Totality of the Real. Even 
here Kant vacillates back and forth, in the Appendix, be- 
tween scepticism and the fundamental thesis of objective 
or absolute Idealism (I use this term to designate the atti- 
tude common to the great post-Kantian Idealists, German 
and English). Whenever he is insisting on the Idea of 
Systematic Unity, of an Intelligible and Coherent Ground 
of phenomena, he is, in principle, an Objective Idealist. 
When he qualifies this position, in a skeptical mood, the 
Idea of the Systematic Unity becomes a heuristic princi- 
ple only. 

I think that Kant, in his development from the pre-crit1- 
cal to the critical phase of his thinking, was moving stead- 
ily towards the following theory: The Empirical Ego is a 
conditioned element in the series of natural phenomena. 

8 See Meiklejohn, p. 425; Adickes, p. 543. 


KANT, THE SEMINAL THINKER hf 


Physical nature (the whole space-time order) and human 
nature are mutually conditioning and conditioned factors 
in the whole empirical realm of phenomena. Their deter- 
minate grounds lie beyond the reach of a cognitive inter- 
pretation of phenomena; but the entire series of external 
and internal phenomena must have a common ground in 
the Systematic Unity of the Real. The latter is adum- 
brated for us in the notion of a Supreme, Self-existent and 
Creative Intelligence which is the inevitable implicate of 
our progressive knowing of phenomenal existence. 

This conception dominates Chapter III, “The ideal 
of Pure Reason,” in the Transcendental Dialectic. More 
particularly it is elaborated with much repetition in section 
VII of this chapter, especially in the subdivision, “Of the 
Ultimate End of the Natural Dialectic of Human Reason.” 

In Chapter III, and in the succeeding “Transcendental 
Doctrine of Method,” Chapter I on “The Discipline of 
Pure Reason” and especially Chapter II on “The Canon 
of Pure Reason,” Kant returns again and again to the 
Ideas of Pure Reason. He reflects upon their significance 
and implications from all sides; as theoretical regulative 
ideas or theoretical hypotheses and as moral postulates. 
How repeatedly insistent is Kant on the necessity of the 
ideas of the unitary soul and God, and especially of the lat- 
ter, as the regulative ideals which guide us into the great- 
est possible systematic unity in the connection of the phe- 
nomena of consciousness and of nature respectively! It is 
no exaggeration to assert that for him the whole growth 
of knowledge presupposes that there is a complete and sys- 
tematic or coherent Intelligible Unity of which all phe- 
nomena are expressions. But, of course, for Kant the 
Unity cannot be known. It is an Ideal Object; an Object- 
in-the-Idea. On grounds of moral experience it becomes a 
practical postulate. Here the idea of God as the Supreme 
Spiritual Reality gives systematic unity to the moral life, 


78 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


for it alone grounds the harmony and unity between moral 
personality and the cosmic conditions of happiness and 
immortal life. 

Thus the idea of God as a theoretical regulative principle 
means that all phenomena, could we but know, are partial 
manifestations of an Intelligible Coherent or Harmonious 
Whole of experience; the idea of God, as practical postu- 
late, adds to the theoretical ideal the rational faith that this 
Coherent and Intelligible System or Whole is the ground 
and conservator of moral values. The merely hypothetical 
and heuristic Speculative Idealism of pure reason becomes 
the Axiological Idealism of the practical reason. In the 
Critique of Judgment, Kant takes a further step in the 
direction of a definitive Objective Idealism. 

The fundamental doctrines of the Critique of Practical 
Reason and the Metaphysic of Morals, and even those of 
the Critique of Judgment, are already outlined in the con- 
cluding sections of the Critique of Pure Reason. 

An astonishing diversity of standpoints claim descent 
from Kant. The chief of these are: Objective Idealism, 
with its variants in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and the later 
English and Italian versions; various neo-Kantianisms and 
neo-Criticisms; the voluntaristic metaphysics of Schopen- 
hauer; the voluntaristic and instrumentalist strains in 
pragmatism and its European kin; the more or less posi- 
tivistic subjectivism or “ideaism” of Mach and his kin; the 
positivistic idealism of the “As If” philosophy of Vaihin- 
ger, etc. Kant has been, without doubt, the most seminal 
influence in modern philosophy. The reason for this is 
that while, in the final and crowning or critical phase of 
his philosophical development, he had moved away from 
subjectivism and skepticism and reached a species of ob- 
jective idealism, his idealism was held in a cautious and 
critical, even skeptical spirit. Huis final conclusions were, 
as Professor Kemp Smith puts it, tentative and experimen- 


KANT, THE SEMINAL THINKER 79 


tal. Kant never strikes the confident, sweeping and dog- 
matic notes of Fichte, Schelling or Hegel. Kant’s Abso- 
lute is always, at most, an inevitable hypothesis or a neces- 
sary postulate. 

Three highly significant positive conclusions do emerge 
from the Critique of Pure Reason, notwithstanding all its 
inconsistencies and waverings, its metaphysical sallies and 
retreats: (1) The new distinction between the objective 
and the subjective. The objective in the realm of appear- 
ances is the physical causal series, since this series is sim- 
ple, uniform and precisely determinable. The subjective 
consists of the physiological and psychological appear- 
ances, since these are complex and variable. But the sub- 
jective series are parts of the all-inclusive spatial and tem- 
poral world-orders. (11) The synthetic processes, which 
condition all experience, are not acts of the empirical sub- 
ject. They are the expressions of the noumenal activity 
of a universal thinking principle which, as the precondition 
of empirical consciousness, cannot be experienced; but 
which, Kant suggests more than once, may well be the 
noumenal ground of the physical factors in experience. 
(111) The final distinction, in the Critical philosophy, be- 
tween appearance and reality is not a contrast between ex- 
perience and that which cannot be experienced. It is a dis- 
tinguishing of factors both of which are involved in the 
determination cf experience as meaningful. Appearance 
is crude experience, the manifold of sense, organized and 
interpreted as far as it goes. Reality is the Ideal Ground, 
the Intelligible Order, the Systematic Unity of Reason, 
which is presupposed and involved in that progressing 
organization and interpretation of the sense-manifold 
which constitutes commonsense knowledge and science; 
and is still more emphatically involved in the moral life. 

For Kant consciousness is essentially the activity of 
judgment, not as aware of itself but as necessarily implied 


80 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


in the synthetic treatment of sensory data. It is the 
dynamic capacity for the awareness of meaning or values 
—logical, ethical, aesthetic values. This is the objective 
nature of consciousness. As individuated consciousness, 
it is a part of the objective order. Our mental states are 
objects—just as truly as physical objects—for conscious- 
ness. Consciousness is awareness of objects in relation. 
It is awareness of meanings, but never awareness of 
awareness. The self, as the individual knower, is a part 
of the natural self. The individual self is conscious only 
insofar as it is conscious of objects. And when it is con- 
scious of its own states these too are objects. We have 
no right to conclude that the transcendental analysis of 
knowledge implies that the empirical self is a noumenal 
self capable of existing independently of the natural sys- 
tem. Scientifically the nature of consciousness is aware- 
ness of meaning. On moral grounds we may be led to 
postulate the abidingness of the self as ethical personality, 
but not on scientific grounds. 

In fine, Kant’s doctrine of knowledge and its place in 
reality implies: (1) That there is a dynamic organizing 
principle active in all stages of experience. (11) That, 
while it is impossible for finite minds, dependent as they 
are upon the reception of stimuli from sources independ- 
ent of themselves, ever to envisage concretely the coher- 
ent totality of experience, the nature of our knowledge 
implies the validity of the ideal of a systematic and coher- 
ent whole or organized totality of experience. Phenomena 
are not illusions. They are real but fragmentary bits of 
knowledge. The noumenal order is not something that 
exists mysteriously behind phenomena. It is the ideal 
order which is presupposed to be real, although it is not 
realizable as such, in every step in the development of 
human knowledge. We must needs think as if it were the 
ultimately real. (111) The noumenal order is the divine 


KANT, THE SEMINAL THINKER 8] 


order—the common ground of our sensory experience and 
our theoretical and practical activities. We are thus led 
to the concept of a Spiritual Ground of nature and human 
nature. But we can never know this ground, since to know 
it would imply that we possessed the complete totality of 
experience and had completely interpreted this in terms of 
reason. 

Kant limits scientific knowledge to mathematically 
ordered sense experience. He excludes psychology and 
even physiology from science, on the ground of the inevi- 
table inexactitude of their subject-matters. Still more he 
excludes the aesthetic, moral and religious experiences 
from the field of science. Kant was a child of the enlight- 
enment, a rationalist. For him what we can measure we 
can know. He was deficient in sentiment, in imagination 
and in historical consciousness. 

The regulative ideals of pure science become, when 
man’s moral life is examined, practical postulates, They 
might be called the transcendental postulates of moral ex- 
perience. Kant’s conception of moral personality is that 
it is self-determining, self-legislating being. The moral 
self recognizes the principle of duty to be the law of its 
own being. In obeying the behests of duty the self is not 
obeying commands opposed upon it from without. It is 
rather realizing itself, willing itself into more adequate 
being. Thus, the moral self can and should look at its own 
motives objectively, weigh and choose between them in the 
light of the absolute principle of the inherent and inalien- 
able value of the moral personality as a member of the 
Kingdom of Ends. The moral self must postulate or, in 
other words, assume and believe that it is self-determin- 
ing; that before it lies the endless vocation of realizing 
moral perfection by living as a member of the common- 
wealth of moral personalities and that the order of physi- 
cal nature is, all appearances to the contrary notwithstand- 


82 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


ing, subordinate and instrumental to the realization of 
moral personality. Thus, faith in God as the supreme 
reality through whose creative and sustaining energy the 
physical world is formed and ordered as the instrument 
of spirit—in other words, faith in the supremacy of the 
good—is the essence of religion. To quote Kant: “There 
is, however, one thing in our soul which, when we take a 
right view of it, we cannot cease to regard with the highest 
astonishment, and in regard to which admiration is right 
or even elevating, and that is the original moral capacity 
in us generally . . . a capacity which proclaims a Divine 
origin.” * “Duty! . . . what origin is there worthy of 
thee, and where is to be found the root of thy noble descent ? 
A root to be derived from which is the indispensable con- 
dition of the only worth which men can give themselves.” ° 
Kant defines religion as the recognition of our duties as 
divine commands. 

Thus, as Norman Kemp Smith puts it, Kant “places in 
the forefront of his system the moral values; and he does 
so under the conviction that in living up to the opportuni- 
ties, in whatever rank of life, of our common heritage, we 
obtain a truer and deeper insight into ultimate issues than 
can be acquired through the abstruse subtleties of meta- 
physical speculation.” ° | 

There remain unsurmounted dualisms in Kant—in met- 
aphysics, the dualism of sense and thought; in ethics, the 
dualism of inclination and duty. 

Kant has been called a formalist in ethics. The criti- 
cism is partly just. But, in his doctrine of moral person- 
ality as an end-in-itself, does he not transcend formalism? 
He has been called an individualist. But he recognizes 
clearly that the moral self is such only as a member of the 
kingdom of ends. And I add, in this day of emphasis on 


4 Abbott, T. K., Kant’s Theory of Ethics, pp. 357f. 
5 Tbid., p. 180. 
® Smith, N. K., A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 1x. 


KANT, THE SEMINAL THINKER 83 


the social, that I do not see how the individual can con- 
tribute much that is worth while to social reconstruction 
if he does not begin by realizing and respecting moral per- 
sonality in himself. He who does not reverence moral 
qualities in himself will not recognize them in others. Self- 
respect is the precondition of respect for others. 

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant gropes his way 
toward suggestions as to how these dualisms might be con- 
ceived as overcome. If we are entitled to conceive nature 
as a realm of ends, as manifesting an immanent teleology, 
then we have a principle, which while we must not use it 
as a lazy man’s method of explaining the particular go of 
natural events, nevertheless gives us a clue to the idea that 
the natural order, taken as a whole, is a substructure or- 
ganic to the spiritual order. Kant admits that, since the 
immanent teleological arrangements of nature are imper- 
fect, we have not the right to conclude that nature as we 
know it is the perfectly responsive instrument of a spirit- 
ual principle. Nevertheless he holds that the living organ- 
ism transcends the categories of blind mechanism. The 
principle of the whole prevades all the parts and the parts 
have an interdependence, such as the parts of a mere 
machine do not have. Kant is a vitalist. 

Furthermore, in our aesthetic and practical relations to 
nature, we really cannot help presupposing an ultimate 
kinship of nature with the human spirit—a kinship in 
which spirit is the higher term. And in the consideration 
of the work of the genius, the seer, the creative artist, we 
are given hints as to the possible working of an Intuitive 
Intelligence the objects of whose intuitions are the spon- 
taneous expressions of his dynamic creativity. 

With the utmost pains, slowly and pertinaciously, the 
isolated pedantic and physically frail sage of Koenigsberg 
pursued his self-imposed task of finding a rational inter- 
pretation of nature, the human spirit and their interrela- 


84 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


tionships; an interpretation which, without the slightest 
concession to superstition, traditionalism, or obscurantism 
and with no appeal to crude passion or cheap utility would 
at once enfranchise the intellect of man, exalt his con- 
science and quicken his will to realize that which is above 
price—rational, just, duty-regarding personality. 

When we consider his physical weakness, the conditions 
under which he labored, his achievements, his nobility of 
soul, Kant is a witness, in propria persona, to the philoso- 
phy he sought to found—an idealism of values which gives 
the fullest range to the free intellect, while holding that 
reason is most truly free and at home with itself when it 
serves the perfecting of moral individuality. In its net 
result of his philosophy in an axiological idealism, not a 
psychologistic “idea-ism.” The soul of Kant is best ex- 
pressed in his own words. “I am by disposition an en- 
quirer. I feel the consuming thirst for knowledge, the 
eager unrest to advance ever further, and the delights of 
discovery. There was a time when I believed that this is 
what confers real dignity upon human life, and I despised 
the common people who know nothing. Rousseau has set 
me right. This imagined advantage vanishes. I learn to 
honor men, and should regard myself as of much less use 
than the common laborer, if I did not believe that my phil- 
osophy will restore to all men the common rights of 
humanity.” * One may paraphrase Pascal and say that 
Kant is one of our chief witnesses to the validity of the 
principle that in the universe there is nothing great but 
man and in man there is nothing great but mind. In this 
sense, Kant is a modern Plato, a refounder of ethical ideal- 
ism, an idealism that recognizes the reality and place of 
physical nature. An idealism that is neither moonshiny 
nor tender-minded; nay rather an idealism which is gen- 
uinely tough-minded and is able to face the harsh facts ot 

7 Fragmente aus dem Nachlasse, Werke (Hartenstein ed.), VIII, p. 624. 


KANT, THE SEMINAL THINKER 85 


life; an idealism which is the true humanism, since it at- 
tempts no cheap and easy solution of the problem of human 
values and social reconstruction by exalting transient util1- 
tarian interests and shibboleths and contemning unremit- 
ting and careful reflection. 

I have time only to suggest in the briefest fashion the 
springs of influence that have flowed from Kant’s phif- 
osophy. 

In Germany, the ethical idealism of Fichte was the direct 
outgrowth of Kant’s moral philosophy. The aesthetic 
idealism and humanism of Schiller and Schelling were de- 
velopments from the Critique of Judgment. Through 
Fichte and Schelling and the general idealistic climate, to 
which Kant gave such an impetus, Hegel owed much to 
Kant; more, I think, than he acknowledged. The new 
grounding of Christian theology by Schleiermacher would 
not have been possible without Kant. Later, the theology 
of Ritschl owed even more to Kant. Schopenhauer’s meta- 
physics of the will starts from Kant’s distinction between 
phenomena and things-in-themselves. Lotze’s emphasis on 
value-judgments and personality is largely a return to the 
spirit of Kant’s ethics, in reaction from the soaring ex- 
travagances of Hegel and his submergence of personality 
to the march of impersonal Reason. Liebmann, after the 
temporary eclipse of idealism in Germany, led the return 
to Kant. The large and flourishing Marburg school, led 
by Cohen and Natorp and with which is affiliated Cassirer, 
claims to embody the spirit of Kant’s philosophy. The 
value-philosophy of Windelband, Rickert, Muensterberg 
and others, owes much to Kant. Eucken’s ethico-religious 
idealism has a deep kinship with Kant, and with Fichte’s 
rendering of Kant. In Husserl and his school, one can 
easily trace the influence of Kant. 

In France I will mention only the most prominent re- 
cent thinkers who exhibit markedly the influence of Kant 


86 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


—Renouvier, Ravaisson, Boutroux. Kant has had a great 
influence on Italian philosophy, both positivistic and ideal- 
istic. 

The Kantian philosophy, in a seriously misunderstood 
form, it is true, was first made known to a wide circle of 
English readers, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge 
seems to have read Kant with neo-Platonic eyes and 
Schellingian spectacles, but he did arouse some interest in 
Kant. Then Carlyle reproduced the Fichtean version of 
Kant’s moral philosophy. I think it possible that, through 
Coleridge, Wordsworth was influenced by Kant. Sir Wil- 
liam Hamilton at Edinburgh and Dean Mansel at Oxford 
gave currency to the agnostic aspect of Kant’s theory of 
knowledge and through them it became the key-note in 
the prelude to Herbert Spencer’s ponderous Synthetic 
Philosophy. Hutchison Sterling produced the first worth- 
while works on Kant and Hegel. The work of T. H. 
Green, R. L. Nettleship, William Wallace, Edward Caird 
cannot be understood without Kant. More indirectly 
through Green and Hegel one can trace the influence of 
Kant in the work of Bosanquet and Bradley. Adamson’s 
work starts from Kant and Fichte. James Ward and his 
school are more directly in line with Kant than the Oxford 
idealists. Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, John Watson, 
J. S. Mackenzie, Henry Jones, A. E. Taylor, G. Dawes 
Hicks, J. H. Muirhead, are selections from a larger list of 
British philosophers who show, in one way or another, 
Kantian influence. One can trace it even in S. Alexan- 
der’s realism. In America Kant’s influence is marked in 
the writing of George H. Howison, Josiah Royce, J. G. 
Schurman, J. E. Creighton, John Dewey, R. M. Wenley, 
Frank Thilly, G. T. Ladd, A. O. Lovejoy and many others. 
Within the last few years Hans Vaihinger’s positivistic 
idealistic version of Kantianism in his “Philosophy of the 
As If” has been a best seller in Germany and risen to the 


KANT, THE SEMINAL THINKER 87 


dignity of a school possessing a journalistic organ. Obvi- 
ously the idealistic, or rather “idea-istic,’ positivisms of 
Poincaré, Mach, Pearson, and others, as well as the prag- 
matism or instrumentalism of Dewey, Schiller and their 
disciples have affinities with Vaihinger’s philosophy. 
Thus, the seeds sown by Kant are still bearing fruits, 
good, bad and indifferent. Nearly every seriously sys- 
tematic thinker finds his pet views adumbrated in Kant. 


JoserH A. LEIGHTON. 
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THE RELIGION OF IMMANUEL KANT 


T IS a significant fact that in this two hundredth year 
after his birth, the influence of Kant in every field of 
philosophy is intensely alive. Many current discussions in 
the domain of religion turn upon questions which he form- 
ulated and perhaps thought he had settled. He regarded 
himself as a revolutionist in thought, and at least did state 
problems in forms which were arresting and persistent. 
He specifically compared the novelty of his views of knowl- 
edge to the epoch-making discovery of Copernicus. His 
revolution consisted in holding that the mind gives struc- 
ture and laws to objects in space and time rather than 
deriving ideas from objects. Did he achieve a similar 
revolution in the treatment of religion? 

He did indeed take up the question which continues more 
than any other to be the center of interest, namely, the 
relation of science and religion. Many think he cut the 
knot instead of untying it, for his solution was to separate 
more sharply and completely and with keener instruments 
of dialectic the realm of science and the realm of religion. 
To science he allotted the field of sensuous experience. 
Whatever we can see, touch, and measure belongs to the 
physical world, but God, freedom, and immortality are not 
visible or tangible and therefore belong to the supersensu- 
ous sphere of spiritual things. He explicitly said: “I had 
to remove knowledge [from any claim to deal with God, 
freedom, and immortality], in order to make room for 
[their substantiation by] faith.” In itself, that conception 


92 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


was not new. It was the old contention of the mystics and 
the advocates of the “double truth.” But Kant put the 
whole matter in a new technique and elaborated the limi- 
tation of knowledge to this present world. So far as sci- 
ence is concerned, his contribution lay in a new and far 
more rigorous negation of the claims of knowledge in mat- 
ters of religion. He exposed the fallacies in the traditional 
arguments for the being of God, for the existence of the 
soul, and for its freedom. Those arguments have never 
recovered from his devastating work. 

But for Kant, that destructive exposure of the claims of 
the understanding was only a preliminary step in clearing 
the way to what he regarded as a far more impressive sub- 
stantiation of the fundamental things of religion. It was 
his purpose to show that religion belongs to a higher realm 
of faith. Above the bounds of reason and independent of 
it, rises the region of the spirit, secure from any intrusion 
of the earthbound senses and natural science. It was a 
sheer dualism, dividing man’s life into utterly alien levels, 
so far at least as any scientific demonstration could reach. 
One reason Kant remains such a lively figure in the 
thought-world of the present time is that many scientists 
and many religionists alike would gladly accept such a sim- 
plification of their problems and yet are haunted by an un- 
conquerable suspicion that it is fallacious and untrue. But 
all who have set their heads to the task know that the ghost 
of Kant’s figure holding apart the heavens and the earth 
will not down until his work is met by some scientific phil- 
osophy of equal strength and magnitude. We therefore 
still have mechanists and vitalists, materialists and spirit- 
ualists, “pure” scientists and idealists, wondering whether 
or no they have anything in common and what it may be. 
Now and then there are scientists vigorously adopting the 
claims of religion and religionists devoutly insisting that 
they are scientific, but none of them has yet succeeded in 








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LEAF FROM AN AUTOGRAPH ALBUM PRESENTING IN KANT’s Own 
HAND A QUOTATION FROM PERSIUS 
Quod petis in te est—ne te quaesiveris 


(What you seek is within you; search not for yourself without) 


THE RELIGION OF IMMANUEL KANT 93 


making Kant appear merely as a thinker of the past and 
not a contemporary. 

Besides this question of the relation of knowledge and 
faith, a second feature of Kant’s religion which makes him 
a living force twelve decades after his death is his identifi- 
cation of religion with the realm of values. In other words, 
religion for him was something a man lived and did not 
merely think about. Living comes first, both in time and 
in importance, even with the man often credited with being 
the greatest thinker of modern times. Kant was the child 
of a pietistic home, and religion reigned in that home in 
the midst of poverty and with little or no aid from worldly 
learning. He forever afterward had that plain fact before 
him. He had felt the power and value of religion as an 
inner, spiritual life under circumstances which revealed 
its independence of earthly wisdom. It was always bound 
up with moral ideals, and its true task was to move the will 
to their fulfilment. This world of values remained in all 
his thinking the supreme realm of life, and devotion to it 
was man’s chief end and glory. Through these values he 
found assurance of the realities of religion in a manner and 
in a degree which far surpassed any “proofs” of science or 
any evidence of the senses. For Kant there was a clear- 
ness and impressiveness about these realities which made 
them as convincing as his own consciousness of himself. 
He lived them. The key to that world of value was the 
sense of duty, the “ought.”’ He meant by that just what 
every plain man feels when he recognizes the obligation to 
be honest, or truthful, or generous. The voice of duty, 
uttering itself in all men, proclaims the reality and the 
authority of the divine will without the mediation of scien- 
tific reasoning or empirical discipline; and this divine will 
is one and the same with the pure, rational will of man him- 
self. This pure, moral law speaks with a categorical im- 
perative which betokens its source in the supersensuous 


94 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


realm. All worldly wisdom is cloyed with hesitating, em- 
pirical, prudential attitudes, but this voice commands with- 
out qualification or consideration of consequences. In con- 
templating this majestic, commanding sense of duty, Kant 
rises to the most eloquent passages in all his writings, and 
the fervor of them in the midst of his rigorous, heavy prose 
is itself evidence of the profound conviction expressed. 
“Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name that dost embrace 
nothing charming or insinuating, but requirest submis- 
sion, . . . what origin is there worthy of thee?” Another 
passage emphasizes the obviousness as well as the sublim- 
ity of the inner law: 

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing 
admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we 
reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral 
law within. I have not to search for them and conjecture 
them as though they were veiled in darkness or were in the 
transcendent region beyond my horizon; I see them before 
me and connect them directly with the consciousness of my 
existence.” 

The significance of this universal, innate moral law for 
religion is that it affords both the basis of assurance and 
the ends of religious endeavor. The existence of this voice 
of duty is the guaranty that man is free to obey it. Other- 
wise the very feeling of obligation would be illusory and 
worse than meaningless. Thus the freedom of the will, 
which baffles all theoretical proof, appears intuitively as 
an implication of the will itself. But human nature is finite 
and can only gradually fulfil the mandates of the moral 
law. Since the law requires perfect realization, finite man 
may only achieve it in an infinite time. The sense of duty 
justifies, then, the hope of immortality, because it is only 
in view of his being immortal that there is any consistency 
in laying the obligations of this law upon man. Kant thus 
validates the second of the three great elements of religion 


THE RELIGION OF IMMANUEL KANT 95 


The third quest is for God. That, too, is satisfied through 
the moral law. God is demanded in the final awards. Man 
cannot determine what the just deserts are in the conduct 
of life. In this world, selfish and evil men seem sometimes 
to gain happiness and good men to receive misfortune and 
suffering. In a fair accounting, the good should attain hap- 
piness, but this requires an infinitely wise and powerful 
Ruler, or God. Here, then, in the superscientific order, as 
implications of the feeling of duty, are found the great 
terms of religion. They are not proved, or inferred, or 
logically demonstrated. They are more immediately given 
than by any process of reasoning. 

In this procedure Kant again comes into a vital issue of 
modern thought. Religious minds recognize increasingly 
that religion is not dependent upon science for its faith, 
but they do not so readily accept Kant’s method. Too much 
has been found out about the empirical character of moral- 
ity. It contains a large admixture of custom, of folkways 
and mores, of education, and of trial and error. Conscience 
speaks different things to men of various cultures, when- 
ever concrete action is required. The faiths of men have 
begotten a vast variety of gods. But religion lives on and 
continues to play an important role in the most developed 
civilizations. It is bound up with all reflections on this 
world as well as the next. The reverence and piety of 
Kant answer to something deep and genuine in all human 
experience, but his earnest endeavor to show that religion 
is something inaccessible to ordinary thought attains only 
a seeming success by his use of non-scientific terms in dis- 
cussing the subject. 

This fact appears in his treatment of a third set of prob- 
lems, in which he freely declares that religious history and 
dogma belong to the realm of symbols and then proceeds 
to justify their use within the limits of reason. This may 
prove to be one of his most fruitful insights and one of his 


96 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


most quickening influences in present and future develop- 
ments of religion. In his elaboration of the implications of 
the moral law, while he speaks of God, freedom, and im- 
mortality, it is with very constant insistence that these 
words do not connote objects or realities as understood by 
the literally minded. They are all beyond the comprehen- 
sion of matter-of-fact thinking. They are poetic, figura- 
tive. But they are not therefore without meaning or value. 
It is just because religion deals with such intimate and pro- 
found experiences that it overflows the measures of the 
common use of words. The value of religion is in its ethi- 
cal significance, in its power over the will. Therefore it 
justly employs appealing symbolism. For Kant, all the 
events described in the Bible as historical have their real 
significance as vivid pictures of the inner spiritual strug- 
gles and achievements in the hearts of men. Satan signi- 
fies the bad tendency. Christ signifies the good. Between 
them is a warfare, by victory in which Christ renders the 
atonement. To believe in Christ is to believe in and seek 
to realize in one’s self the ideal nature which was in him 
and isinus. A church is a community of souls aiding each 
other by example, comfort, and encouragement to attain 
that ideal. It is a helpful institution so long as man needs 
such support in living the good life, and that probably will 
be a much longer time than Kant thought. The ceremonies 
of public service have worth insofar as they helpfully pre- 
sent the great ethical ends of life and the means to their 
realization. They are symbolic presentations of the living 
drama of man’s moral struggle. All sacred books have 
their worth through their use of the dramatic and poetic 
story of this inner life. The key to everything is to be 
found in our own spirits, and therefore the imposition of 
external dogmas or traditions is the death of religion. In 
a certain sense, Kant is committed to an esoteric interpre- 
tation, but he escapes the evil of esotericism by proclaim- 


THE RELIGION OF IMMANUEL KANT 97 


ing how everyone may enter into the inner circle, namely, 
by realizing the nature of the religious drama and accept- 
ing it as such. He further suggests that religious ideas 
and ceremonials undergo a process of change and growth 
in the direction of greater consistency with the prevailing 
culture of a people. Theologians must be free as scholars 
to investigate and restate the faith; as preachers, they may 
utilize the sacred books and all ceremonials as poetic and 
dramatic symbols for the advancement of the ethical life. 
Religion is thus brought into the field of art, where an in- 
creasing number of churchmen as well as scholars feel it 
to be most at home. 

It is interesting in this connection to reflect that the 
three aspects of Kant’s religion touched upon are so much 
reflected in the poetry of the nineteenth century. Coleridge, 
Wordsworth, and Tennyson voiced his limitations of 
knowledge, his reverence for the moral law, and his appre- 
ciation of symbolism. All of these are illustrated in four 
familiar lines of Tennyson: 


Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 
Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 

Believing where we cannot prove. 


EDWARD SCRIBNER AMES. 
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. 





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KANT AS A STUDENT OF NATURAL SCIENCE 


HROUGHOUT a long career as thinker and teacher, 

Immanuel Kant was guided and informed by the dom- 
inant interests of the philosopher and metaphysician. He 
was also, especially during the earlier half of his life, an 
eager and thoughtful reader of the literature of the mathe- 
matical and physical sciences. The mere titles of his writ- 
ings during this period indicate clearly the scientific direc- 
tion of his mind. Among eighteen essays and short studies 
produced before his fortieth year, eleven are discussions 
of a strictly scientific subject-matter; and in several of 
these essays there are advanced ideas and hypotheses of 
noteworthy originality and permanent value. Kant him- 
self, to be sure, never engaged in experimental investiga- 
tions in the field of science, although he was interested in 
the results and methods of experimental research. It would 
be pertinent to raise the question—which, however, this 
occasion furnishes no opportunity to discuss—as to just 
how intimate may have been Kant’s acquaintance with the 
details of the actual experimental procedure of his day. 
On this occasion, perhaps, it is more to the point to lay 
stress upon the fact—easily missed by those whose knowl]- 
edge of Kant has not progressed beyond the stage of read- 
ing about, rather than in, him—that although Kant came 
eventually to teach that the ultimate validity of natural 
science is guaranteed only by certain principles which he 
held to be a priori, i. e., independent as regards their proof 


102 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


of any observations of fact, he none the less and quite con- 
sistently therewith insisted upon the empirical method as 
indispensible in any scientific study of the realm of nature. 
The distinguished physicist, Helmholtz, in his Heidelberg 
address of 1871 declared: “The Kant of early life was a 
natural philosopher by instinct and by inclination; and 

. probably only the power of external circumstances, 
the want of means necessary for independent scientific re- 
search, and the tone of thought prevalent at the time, kept 
him to philosophy. . . . It is exactly an inversion of the 
historical connection, when Kant’s name is occasionally 
misused, to recommend that natural philosophy shall leave 
the inductive method, by which it has become great, to re- 
vert to the windy speculations of a so-called “deductive 
method.’ No one would have attacked such a misuse, more 
energetically and more incisively, than Kant himself if he 
were still among us.” * One may well doubt whether 
Kant was “by instinct and by inclination” a natural scien- 
tist. But one welcomes this scientist’s recognition that 
there is nothing in the spirit of Kant’s philosophy, with 
all of its stress upon the a priori foundations of natural 
science, opposed to the empirical procedure in the study of 
nature. 

Kant’s scientific interests constituted a vital factor in his 
philosophical development. The fact that, during the 
earlier half of his life, Kant’s thoughts were directed 
toward the phenomena of the physical universe and toward 
man’s efforts to achieve, through mathematics, a true sci- 
ence of nature, determined to a very great extent the char- 
acter of the whole Kantian philosophy. The book which 
stands as the greatest single work of his philosophical 
genius—the Critique of Pure Reason—was published, as 
is well known, only when Kant had attained to his fifty- 
seventh year. It was, from more than one point of view, 


1 Popular Lectures on peels Subjects (trans. E. Atkinson), London, 
1881. Second Series, p. 141f. 


KANT AS A STUDENT OF NATURAL SCIENCE 103 


the outcome of the author’s long preoccupation with the 
methods and results of mathematical physics. The Critique 
of Pure Reason has, indeed, been subjected to an amazing 
variety of interpretations, both as regards its doctrinal 
content and as regards its place in the total perspective of 
Kant’s whole system as well as in the larger perspective 
of modern philosophy as a whole. But at least one signifi- 
cant fact, as regards the motivation of the work, is beyond 
differences of opinion. Kant had become poignantly aware 
of the contrast between the sure and steady advance of 
men’s knowledge in the fields of mathematics and physics 
on the one hand and the apparent failures of historical 
metaphysics on the other. To attain to a thorough under- 
standing of the factors and causes determining this con- 
trast was the avowed aim of the first Critique. May not, 
Kant asks—nay must not—the philosopher and metaphysi- 
cian learn wisdom from those enterprizes which have ad- 
vanced so much further along a secure pathway of prog- 
ress? Hence, of course, those three famous Kantian ques- 
tions, whose complete answer is the Critique of Pure Rea- 
son; (1) How is mathematics as a science possible? (2) 
How is physics as a science possible? and (3) Js metaphys- 
ics as a science possible, and if so, how? The Critique of 
Pure Reason was, in its avowed aim, unmistakably a treat- 
ise on the philosophy of science. Any discussion, however, 
of this philosophy of science lies perforce beyond the limits 
of the present undertaking. In these remarks, addressed 
as they are, primarily to those who have previously made 
little or no study of Kant, and limited to a short period of 
twenty-five minutes, we can scarcely do more than touch 
briefly on the early scientific essays, hoping to suggest 
something of their general character and significance for 
science. 

Kant’s earliest published work was an essay, written 
in 1746 at the close of his student days at Koenigsberg, 


104 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


entitled Thoughts on the true Evaluation of living Force. 
It was a discussion of a topic that had been subject of con- 
troversy among physicists for more than fifty years, viz., 
the correct definition of the measure of force (vis viva). 
At the present time it has become entirely evident—as in- 
deed it had become to D’Alembert three years before Kant 
wrote—that the issue rested upon various misunderstand- 
ings which rendered the dispute to a considerable extent 
a verbal one. Inasmuch as the youthful Kant of twenty- 
two years failed to discern this, his first scientific writing 
possesses practically no scientific value today—although 
it contains several matters of interest to a Kantian biog- 
rapher. 

It is well known that Kant’s interest in mathematical 
physics had been stimulated during his student days chiefly 
by his philosophy professor, Martin Knutzen. It was at 
the latter’s instigation, and under his guidance, that Kant 
began the careful study of Newton’s Principia, which soon 
opened up to him a wholly new conception of the material 
universe and henceforth shaped his ideals of scientific 
knowledge. The fruits of this study of Newton began to 
appear about eight years after the first essay just referred 
to. The Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin had proposed 
a prize question for the year 1754 as follows: Has the 
Rotation of the Earth which produces the Alternation of 
Day and Night undergone any Change since the Time of 
its Origin? If so, What is the Cause, and how can the 
fact be established? The proposal of this question prompted 
Kant to publish in a weekly Koenigsberg review two 
closely related studies entitled: 4 Consideration of the 
Question whether the Earth has undergone any Alteration 
of its Axial Rotation, and The Question whether the Earth 
grows old, physically considered. 

In the latter of the two essays Kant discussed the vari- 
ous agencies whereby changes in the condition and struc- 


KANT AS A STUDENT OF NATURAL SCIENCE 105 


ture of the earth are brought about, and introduced in a 
very few words the conception of base-levelling, now 
familiar enough to geological students. He wrote: “In 
respect to change of the earth’s shape there remains to be 
discussed a single cause which can be counted upon with 
certainty; it consists in the fact that the rain and streams 
continually attack the land and sluice it down from the 
highlands to the lowlands, gradually making the elevations 
into plains and, so far as in them lies, strive to rob the 
globe of its inequalities. This action is certain and no mat- 
ter of opinion. The land is subject to this action so long 
as there is material on the declivities which can be attacked 
and transported by rain water.” * Of greater interest is 
the earlier of the two essays in which for the first time the 
hypothesis was enunciated that the earth’s rotation on its 
axis is retarded by the tides. Of Kant’s scientific contri- 
bution here, Lord Kelvin wrote in 1897 as follows: “Kant 
pointed out in the middle of the last century what had not 
previously been discovered by mathematicians or physical 
astronomers, that the frictional resistance against tidal 
currents on the earth’s surface must cause a diminution of 
the earth’s rotational speed. This really great discovery 
in natural philosophy seems to have attracted very little 
attention—indeed to have passed quite unnoticed—among 
mathematicians . . . until 1840, when the doctrine of 
energy began to be taken to heart.” Kant not only as- 
serted that the earth’s rotation is retarded, but also at- 
tempted—though from quite insufficient data—a computa- 
tion of the rate of the retardation. This latter, as more 
recent calculations have shown, Kant grossly overesti- 
mated. The earth’s rotation was arrived at by Kant deduc- 
tively, not however as a final “conclusion” but as an hypo- 
thesis to be tested. Kant himself confessed that he knew 


of no empirical facts, or historical evidence, which could 
2 Kant’s Schriften (Edition of the Prussian Academy of Sciences), Vol. 
I, p. 209. 


106 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


show that the retardation actually had taken place. It was, 
seemingly, his awareness that he had no sufficient empiri- 
cal proof of this specific hypothesis that prevented him 
from submitting his essay for the prize offered by the 
Academy. But, as Lord Kelvin so clearly confesses, it was 
no small achievement to have seen for the first time this 
implication of established mechanical principles. 

In the winter of 1755 Kant entered upon his teaching 
in the University at Koenigsberg. The subjects of his 
lectures included the several philosophical disciplines; but 
he lectured also on Mathematics, Mechanics, Theoretical 
Physics, Physical Geography, and—starting at a some- 
what later date—Anthropology. His lectures on Physical 
Geography appear to have been favorites with Kant and 
his auditors alike, and the course was continued through- 
out the forty years of Kant’s teaching in the University. 
In 1756 he published a monograph and two essays on the 
phenomena of the Lisbon earthquake of the preceding year. 
Another work of the same year, also indicative of Kant’s 
interest in geography, was entitled New Remarks in Ex- 
planation of the Theory of the Winds. His argument 
here seems to have been directed against D’Alembert, who 
ten years before had sought to account for atmospheric 
currents as the immediate result of the attraction of the 
sun and moon. Kant appeals to the rotation of the earth 
on its axis as the important factor in determining the direc- 
tion of the periodical winds, the monsoons and trade-winds. 

Passing by the other minor writings of this period, let 
us briefly consider the work of which so far no mention 
has been made, but which more than any other seems to 
give Kant an assured place in the history of natural sci- 
ence, viz., the Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. 
This was Kant’s most striking adventure into the realm of 
scientific hypothesis, and reveals most distinctly the effects 
of his studies of Newton. In the essay on the earth’s re- 


KANT AS A STUDENT OF NATURAL SCIENCE 107 


tardation by the tides, Kant had included, quite incident- 
ally, a most original explanation of the fact that the moon 
always presents its same face to the earth. The moon, he 
said, had been originally in a fluid state. The tides pro- 
duced in it by the earth had retarded its rotation until now 
its period of rotation coincides with the period of its revo- 
lution about the earth. He went on further to predict that 
the earth’s rotation would continue to be retarded until its 
period would be the same as that of the moon’s revolution. 
Thereupon the earth would continue to present its same 
side to the moon and the moon would then appear to an 
observer upon the earth to be stationary. But Kant con- 
cluded the essay by saying: “This hypothesis is all of a 
piece with a comprehensive theory of the universe which 
I am about to publish under the title: Cosmogony, or an 
Attempt to derive the Origin of the World, the Constitu- 
tion of the Heavenly Bodies, and the Causes of their 
Motions from the Universal Laws of the Motion of Mat- 
ter, according to the Theory of Newton. 

The work which was thus announced appeared in 1755 
with the altered title: Universal Natural History and The- 
ory of the Heavens, published, however, without the auth- 
or’s name. It is difficult to understand why it should have 
been published anonymously inasmuch as Kant had already 
heralded its publication; nor did its authorship long re- 
main unknown, for the work was listed under Kant’s name 
in an advertisement of a Koenigsberg bookseller in the 
following year. The History and Theory of the Heavens, 
however, suffered an untoward fate. Except for a brief 
notice in a Hamburg journal, it attracted almost no atten- 
tion at the time. Despite Kant’s later references to it, and 
an abridgement of it later published under Kant’s super- 
vision, it was practically lost to the sight of the scientific 
world for almost a century. Attention having been re- 


3 Kant’s Schriften (Edition of the Prussian Academy of Science), Vol. I, 
p. 191. 


108 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


called to it by the French astronomer, Arago, in 1842, its 
merits came gradually to be recognized on the continent. 
In England reference to it seems to have been made first by 
De Morgan in 1848, and at greater length and more appre- 
ciatively by Thomas Huxley and Lord Kelvin in 1869. 
Thus tardily was it recognized that Kant had in many 
striking essentials anticipated the conception, or theory, 
of the orign of the solar system which Laplace, forty-one 
years after Kant, had developed with greater brevity and 
mathematical nicety and designated the “Nebular Hypo- 
thesis.”’ 

The awe which Kant confessed—in an oft-quoted pass- 
age of the Critique of Practical Reason—ever to have felt 
in the presence of the universe of the starry heavens, dated 
back at least to his early school days before the university, 
when his favorite Latin author, Lucretius, fascinated his 
imagination with the poetry of the infinite atomic worlds. 
More recently his study of Newton had supplied him with 
an entirely different conception of mechanics than that 
upon which Lucretius had relied in his De rerum natura. 
There was now added to the still present awe at the maj- 
esty of the starry heavens a new wonderment at the 
potency of mathematical physics. At the opening of the 
famous seventh chapter of the second part of the History, 
Kant wrote: “The universe by its immeasurable extent, 
and the infinite diversity and beauty it in every direction 
displays reduces us to silent wonder. If the presentation 
of all this moves the imagination, the understanding is 
seized with a different rapture when it considers . . . that 
such magnificence and such greatness, all flow from a sin- 
ele law, with eternal and perfect order.” * 

With sober scientific caution, Newton had formulated 
his gravitational theory with reference only to the present 
movements of the solar system. Within these limits his 

4 Ibid., p. 306. 


KANT AS A STUDENT OF NATURAL SCIENCE 109 


mathematical deductions could receive their empirical veri- 
fication. His theory had included no explanation of the 
axial rotation of the planets and their satelites, nor of the 
original tangential impetus of their revolutions. So far 
as the scientific theory of Newton was concerned, these 
might still be referred devoutly to the originating activity 
of the Deity. Kant’s concern was now with the origin of 
the present order of the universe. A scientific explanation 
of this need not destroy one’s piety; a natural effect such 
as the now existing planetary system must have its natural 
causes. Indeed, in the /ntroduction to the History, Kant 
was careful to point out that if it could be made out that 
such an orderly universe as ours has evolved through the 
mere working of the natural laws of matter, this would in 
itself be a powerful argument in support of Theism rather 
than the reverse. And so later, in his work on The Only 
Possible Proof of the Existence of God, he directed the 
attention of his readers again to this earlier work on cos- 
mology. His scientific imagination having, then, in his 
early years been made, with Lucretius, the spectator of all 
time, Kant now undertakes the ideal experiment of a sim- 
ilarly comprehensive view of the process of the world’s 
genesis through the more modern glasses provided by 
Newton. “I accept,” he writes,* “the matter of the whole 
world as in a state of dispersion in the beginning and make 
of it a complete chaos. I observe this matter shaping itself 
in accordance with the established laws of attraction, and 
modifying its movement by repulsion. Without having re- 
course to arbitrary hypotheses, I enjoy the pleasure of ob- 
serving a well ordered universe produced under the regu- 
lation of the established laws of motion, and this universe 
looks so like the system of the world that we see before 
our eyes, that I cannot refuse to identify it with it.’ 
5 Ibid., p. 225f. 


110 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


Let not the two brief rapturous passages just quoted cre- 
ate a false impression of the character of the History. For 
the greater part it consists of quite sober and substantial 
argument. It brings together and analyzes an impressive 
array of facts for the purpose of showing that the principles 
of the Newtonian mechanics are adequate to explain the 
origin of the existing order, not only within the solar sys- 
tem but throughout the entire sidereal universe. Kant at 
points, certainly, permits himself excursions into the fasci- 
nating realm of pure conjecture, as when, e. g., he specu- 
lates upon the inhabitants of other planets, or upon the 
destiny of an immortal soul in this Newtonian universe. 
But for all that, he is not oblivious of the boundaries which 
separate the realm where fancy may play and the realm of 
scientifically verifiable fact. Kant’s cosmogonical hypothe- 
sis differed in some striking respects from the later 
Laplacean theory. Kant assumed, e. g., that the nebulous 
matter from which the process of genesis begins was cold 
and without rotary motion, while Laplace started with a 
heated, rotating nebula. It was at a considerably later 
date that Kant became acquainted with the experiments of 
Crawford on the development of heat through the com- 
pression of gases, which would have enabled him to sup- 
plement in an important way his theory as to the origin of 
the heat of the sun and the planets. 

One of the most serious errors in Kant’s speculations in 
this field was inevitable until the later developments of 
thermo-dynamics. For Kant supposed that, in consequence 
of the retardation of their motions, all of the planets must 
eventually in the remote future fall into the sun. The heat 
which would be thus generated in the central mass would, 
he thought, be sufficient to dissociate the matter of the sys- 
tem and restore it to its original nebulous state. There- 
upon would recommence a fresh cycle of cosmic evolution, 
and so on worlds without end. This part of the theory, by 


KANT AS A STUDENT OF NATURAL SCIENCE rit 


making of the material universe a perpetual motion 
machine, is of course incompatible with the now accepted 
second law of thermo-dynamics. Numerous other defects 
in the details of Kant’s cosmogony have frequently enough 
been pointed out. It seems more useful, however, to insist 
upon the novel and positive character of its achievement, 
in extending the Newtonian principles, exemplified and 
verified by the present movements of the planetary system 
to the interpretation of the process whereby the system it- 
self has evolved and come into being. 

The English translator of Kant’s Natural History of the 
Heavens, in his Introduction, writes: “This work will prob- 
ably be regarded hereafter as the most wonderful and en- 
during product of Kant’s genius.” Few students of Kant, 
I suspect, would agree with Mr. Hastie’s exaggerated esti- 
mate of this work. Without derogating from the merits 
of Kant’s History, one may assert that the most remark- 
able evidences of Kant’s genius are rather to be sought in 
the Critique of Pure Reason, together, perhaps, with the 
two later Critiques. Kant’s genius was that of the philos- 
opher. Yet as little, I think, should one accept the state- 
ment of Professor Paulsen in his excellent volume, Jmman- 
uel Kant. Paulsen writes: “If Kant had died at the same 
age as Spinoza, Descartes, Lessing, or Schiller, his name 
would scarcely be heard at the present time.” ° This seems 
to mean that Kant’s reputation could be secured by no work 
prior to the Critique of Pure Reason; and if, as the con- 
text appears to suggest, the remark is intended as an esti- 
mate of the merits of Kant’s pre-critical writings, it is 
scarcely judicial. Kant’s early scientific essays were surely 
sufficient to secure him a permanent place in the history of 
science—although, indeed, that might not mean that his 
name would be frequently heard at the present day. 


NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY. S. G. MarTIN. 
* Immanuel Kant (trans. Creighton and Lefevre), p. 66. 


Viziavis ) 1a 





KANnvT’s PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 





KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 


a hs OBTAIN an insight into the bearing of Kant’s 
conception of religion it is necessary to recall a few of 
the essentials of real religion and some of the deeper im- 
pulses by which it appears to be motivated; also to sepa- 
rate from these deeper trends many false conceptions that 
are widely entertained. 


RELIGION IN GENERAL 


Religion is not “an imaginative echo of things natural 
and moral.’ It is not to be identified with an insidious 
poetic affirmation of compensations that really are absent 
in the universe. It is not to be identified with primitive 
false interpretations of the world and life. Men who be- 
lieve in progress, who trust the truth and beneficence of 
science, often inconsistently relegate the term religion to 
the primitive faiths of the other fellow. 

However much religions of the past have been steeped 
in symbolism, ambiguous proofs by analogy of the realities 
for which man’s childish heart has longed; however much 
religions of the past have been controlled by superstitious 
rites and ceremonials, magic, occultism and fetish worship, 
religion in its complete form is no more to be identified 
with these things than is scientific knowledge to be con- 
fined to the childish lispings of man’s first attempts at 
knowledge. Indeed, there is no more reason for suppos- 
ing magic, occultism, spiritism to be forms of early relig- 


is IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


ious phenomena than to be forms of early science. Relig- 
ion is not to be identified with spiritism nor with a belief 
in a two-world supernaturalism or in the essential contin- 
gency of the relation of God and nature. 

It is indeed a pathetic conception of religion too com- 
mon in popular thought that would tie it to the miraculous 
events of life, confine it to external authoritarianism, as- 
sume it must necessarily be conservative, conceive it to be 
a worship of mystery, reduce it to the dumb awesomeness 
of life, or in other ways ostracize the scientific spirit from 
the heart of modern religious endeavor. Science seeks 
clearness, not mystery; law, not chance; intelligence, not 
dumbness ; open-mindedness, not solidifying conservatism; 
critical, individual verification, not authoritarianism. But 
nothing of the scientific temper or the true, scientific spirit 
of critical observation, creativeness, and verification is for- 
eign to modern religion. Indeed, modern scientific cre- 
ativeness, beginning in the seventeenth century, is one of 
the greatest expressions of religious life; comparable with 
it, the Reformation and the rise of western institutional 
religion are as nothing. 

Religion is devotion to superlative values expressed as 
organic in a cosmic order. The religious view therefore 
necessarily stresses the fact and great importance of the 
realm of value and interprets reality in terms of value as 
well as in terms of relatively non-value facts. 

However, religion is never satisfied merely to affirm 
value. It interprets life and being in terms of an hier- 
archical order. Values for religion cannot all be equal 
and they cannot be accepted as through and through illu- 
sions. However much men adopt fleeting, evanescent and 
contradictory loyalties, the profounder religious attitude 
holds that for any religion, whether relative or absolute, 
there must be an aristocracy of values, there must be 
superlative goods in reference to the largest whole of fact, 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION ee?) 


the cosmos, and in reference to every part thereof that has 
an organized preciousness. 

Hence, religion affirms that there is a superlative good 
for each individual and for society in the realm of the 
theoretically possible, and that it is the duty of each truly 
religious person to endeavor to find it. Rejecting the abso- 
lute equality of all values it affirms the great importance 
and the profound fact of the real as involving a contrast 
between the higher and the inferior. Hence the meaning 
of God, of divinity, of holiness, of sacredness, of spiritual- 
ity, of the preciousness of the true, the good and the beau- 
tiful. Hence the importance to religion of the idealistic 
urge and its antagonism to all forms of materialism and 
reductionism. Hence the emphasis on purpose, finality 
and personality. Hence its sensitiveness to sin, failure, 
and defeat and its great teachings as to the ways of re- 
demption and of salvation. Hence its emphasis on the 
ways of reaching superlative satisfaction; for the religious 
aim of life is appreciation of the Most High. The ways 
by which men may attain such salvation are marvelously 
diverse and wonderfully rich. They are all functions of 
world conceptions, the experimental trials of life, and the 
particular values that men choose to be supreme. 

Different conceptions of the world’s structure produce 
different forms of superlative outlook. For instance, the 
religions of mysticism and their stress on immanent unity ; 
deism and its externalism; theism and its attempt to inter- 
pret the world as an order of continuous contrast with a 
supreme personality; or again, the religion of Epicurean 
comfort, of Stoic enurement, or the cramped subjective 
idealism of a naturalism that sees in outward nature only 
an indifferentism to man’s cherished hopes, that forces 
man to find peace in the inward depths of his own fanciful 
creation; or, finally, the materialism that confines satisfac- 
tion to mere physical well-being, bodily health, nutrition 


118 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


and sanitation, because man is conceived to be a piece of 
the earth or is represented to be in the pitiable plight of 
struggling helplessly in the web of physical causation. 
Thus, all values are shaped by the contours of cosmic mean- 
ing. As we said, religion is devotion to superlative values, 
but values set in a cosmic meaning. And these values 
alter in shape and form like the placid waters that meander 
with the rambling shore line or twist and bend with the 
obtruding promontories and the changing continents. 

At this point it might be well to make a fundamental 
distinction between what we may call “great” religion 
and “cramped” religion. Just as we may divide all ethical 
codes and systems, whether popular or philosophical, into 
two classes, namely universal and group ethics, or humani- 
tarian and individual in distinction from tribal and national 
ethics—so we may divide religious aspiration into two 
forms. On the one hand, we find religions that conceive 
unity to transcend all differences between value and fact 
anywhere, that emphasize universality and an absolute 
sufficiency that is perfect, that conceive all relations as ulti- 
mately internal, that affirm the immanent unity of all fact 
and hence are driven to see the world in terms of an or-: 
ganic unity of all the categories, a universal intelligence 
or an absolute whole, and that conceive the problem of 
evil to be the problem of harmonizing an external related- 
ness with an ultimate internality of relations, or of con- 
ceiving every evil as a two-phase situation, absolute and 
relative. Here the problem of evil is solved when we come 
to see the immanent unity of the categories of facts in the 
large, especially of good and evil, and come to apprehend 
the perfect in the absolute. On the other hand, we have a 
second class of religions that stress the primacy of exter- 
nal relations, especially externalism between values and 
non-values or impersonal facts, and that conceive the prob- 
lem of evil as essentially and ultimately a conflict of terms 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 119 


in external relations. Evil and good are treated as dual- 
istic even though they are said to be in an otherwise or- 
ganic world—a world interpreted sometimes impersonally, 
sometimes personally. Hence the problem of evil is solved 
only by the victory of one term and the elimination of the 
other. The former may be called great religion, the latter 
cramped religion. To the latter class belong the highly 
specialized superlatives at which men often grasp because 
thought has driven them up some blind alley of the laby- 
rinths of existence or because thought has squeezed life 
so tightly that it sees the light of hope only through a crev- 
ice between the canyon walls above. All such are genuine 
expressions of religion. For the religions of man are not 
confined to some six or a score of national world sects. 
The religions of life are as the sands of the sea. 

Some of the many forms of cramped religious life are 
revealed in the following values that express to man the 
superlatives in life or serve as beacon lights in the order- 
ing of human activities. Thus, some men find the great 
satisfactions of life in preoccupation with the world as it is 
rather than with what one might desire it to be, or think 
it ought to be. In other words, they have a preference for 
the ideal of the 1s over that of the ought to be, so loved by 
Kant. This attitude is a form of restricted religious moti- 
vation. Not every one has admired the starry heavens 
above nor the moral law within, and it is just such facts 
that are profoundly important to religion. Religion must 
take up into itself just such antithetical admirations. Or, 
again, we may note the superlative satisfaction that some 
men have in the cold truth of disillusionment even though 
this means an absolute reversal of human hopes; the joy 
some men find in irony, in scintillating negativity, in the 
shock of expressed ennui with what is commonly taken for 
goodness, as witnessed in Mencken; with uplift, good peo- 
ple, prohibition, Rotary and Kiwanis and Y. M. C. A. 


120 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


boostings. Or, again, we might refer to the supreme sat- 
isfaction some persons obtain from hugging illusions, 
errors, and fancy so long as they bring comfort, because 
truth and goodness are believed not to be one but the world 
is supposed to be a solid fact, alien to man’s hopes for hap- 
piness and to possess a truth bitter and cold to man’s ten- 
der aspirations. “If we knew all,” says Anatole France, 
“Wwe could not support life an hour. The sentiments which 
make it sweet, or at least tolerable for us, spring from a 
lie and nourish themselves on illusions.” Or, again, the 
dominating satisfaction in the belief that the unreasonable 
is more precious than the reasonable, such that Tertullian 
could say that the very virtue of true belief lies in its being 
without the support of reason, is a form of cramped relig- 
ious value. Contrary to the modern notion of the rela- 
tion of faith and reason, Tertullian could glory in the 
thought that the man of faith renounced reason. Once 
more, we call attention to the supreme satisfaction certain 
modern minds find in the cause of truth, of truth for truth’s 
sake, and in scientific method, so that passionately they can 
proclaim “belief is desecrated when given to unproved and 
unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleas- 
ure of the believer,” or the superlative value of melancholi- 
ness of men like Schopenhauer who could say, “Happiness 
is childish and shallow, only misery is profound”; or, 
again, to the satisfaction of the optimist who thinks all 
melancholy and pessimism to be cowardly, bad, and utterly 
irrational; or, finally, to the host of cramped superlatives 
such as belief that salvation lies in denial or ultimate doubt 
of everything rather than in affirmation, trust, confidence 
in all things, or the glorification of the bizarre, the out- 
rageous and meaningless in opposition to the beautiful, the 
harmonious and significant, or the possession by the mind 
of the spirit of decadence instead of the spirit of construc- 
tive up-building, or the dominant sweep of the ideas of 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION ye 


progress, control, utility, and responsibility instead of their 
opposites, or the worship of force in place of goodness, of 
immediacy instead of the eternal and absolute, the trust 
in things and mechanism in preference to persons and 
plans, or the glorification of necessity and the gladsome 
acceptance of life and fact in contrast to the spirit of stub- 
born rebellion and of fretful hostility toward the system of 
the cosmos. All these manifestations reveal the vastness 
of religious impulse working in the cramped alleys of cos- 
mic interpretation. 

Bosanquet’s interpretation of religion belongs to that 
group of conceptions that might be called great religion. 
Kant’s conception of reality and the consequent meaning of 
religion have affinities to both great and cramped religion. 


MEANING OF RELIGION TO KANT AND His TREATMENT 
OF THE ONTOLOGICAL PERFECT 


It has been said: “The outstanding trait of Kant’s reflec- 
tion upon religion is its supreme interest in morals and 
conduct.” * Religion was profoundly real to Kant. To 
him religion might be said to be conduct backed by (1) be- 
lief in a just transcendent God; (2) an inspiration com- 
ing from a conviction that what ought to be is or will be 
realized because the reality of the ought-to-be demands a 
just opportunity for man to realize his duties; and (3) a 
consciousness of the ought and its demand for justice, re- 
sponsibility and righteousness requiring an acknowledge- 
ment of freedom. In short, for Kant religion is conduct 
backed by belief in an ultimate ordering of justice and the 
ideas necessary to such. Character or morality is the end 
of life because character is the ultimate backing of life. 

Kant would not have agreed with Hegel that religion is 


“the knowledge possessed by the finite mind of its nature 
1 Moore, Christian Thought Since Kant, p. 74. 


122 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


as absolute mind.” Kant was tinctured too much with 
deism to feel the force of such a statement.. Nor would 
Kant identify religion with feeling. He would not be 
happy in describing it as a sense of awe for this would 
remove it too far from the pure universal. Says Kant, “If 
feeling of any sort has to be presupposed before the will 
can be determined, the will is not determined because of 
the law and therefore the action is not moral but simply 
legal.” * Nor would Kant be satisfied with the description 
of religion as a trend in nature that makes for righteous- 
ness; to him nature was too mechanical, too impersonal, 
too phenomenal to be thus represented. Religion to Kant 
1s an appeal of that which transcends nature. God is pos- 
tulated as “a cause distinct from nature” (p. 131). Kant 
would not be content with Schleiermacher’s interpreta- 
tion of religion as the feeling, or sense, of absolute depend- 
ence, for religion to him was essentially an expression of 
the ethical, of the spirit of duty, justice and righteousness. 
feel that form and ritual were of great significance to reli- 
Nor again would Kant affirm that religion was mainly a 
body of doctrines; and Kant was too much of a pietist to 
gion. He would hesitate at calling religion a form of expe- 
rience, for the term experience had too much of the smack 
of the empirical. Kant’s religion was not a type of cogni- 
tion so much as a conviction that an ultimate universal 
order of righteousness or what ought to be, is, and hence 
will be fulfilled. God is the existential expression of the 
universality and the compelling force of the ought-to-be. 
Likewise immortality and freedom are expressions of this 
demand of a universal value. 

Kant could say with Bosanquet that it is by religion that 
man attains confidence in life and comes to be “at home 
in the universe.” But he would have meant something 

2 Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Hartenstein’s edition of Kant, Vol. V, 


p. 76. All page references in the body of this paper henceforth are to this 
volume. 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 123 


quite different from Bosanquet. To Bosanquet the relig- 
ious meaning of “at home in the universe” appears to be 
a more or less conscious apprehension, or an expression 
through a conscious faith, of the ultimate perfection and 
sufficiency of the whole, the perfection of the absolute. In 
other words, to Bosanquet this sense of religious peace, 
the ultimate fitness of all things, is different from the peace 
of Epicurean comfort, in that true religious peace comes 
from the higher, more intellectual apprehension of the ulti- 
mate perfection and unity of all the categories and factors 
of life. Bosanquet holds that this sense of unity and har- 
mony of the perfect whole comes to be most fully realized 
by man only as he enters into devotion to a cause, only as 
he seeks oneness with a whole that transcends his limited 
particular self, only as he ceases to be rebellious and fret- 
ful toward the conditions of life and seeks unity through 
love, loyalty and friendship. Bosanquet would say, “You 
are made whole like unto the absolute when you give your- 
self to something which is supreme.” By this devotion one 
attains not only the salvation of religious peace but gains 
an insight into the most high, the absolute, perfect in- 
dividuality. 

To Kant, on the other hand, to be “at home in the uni- 
verse’ does not mean that abiding sense of the perfection 
of the absolute or a way of life that initiates one into that 
insight so much as it appears to mean a sense of comfort 
and security that comes from the conviction that “God’s 
in His Heaven,” and He, being ethical, will back the right- 
eousness of individual, retributive justice. 

In other words, the principle at the base of religion 
appears to Bosanquet to be the ontological intuition; to 
Kant, it is the force of the conviction of a universal impell- 
ing ought, an order of righteousness in an apparently con- 
tingent order. For Kant regards the ontological argu- 
ment or principle as false. He would say that man feels 


124 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


himself religiously at home in the universe because of jus- 
tification by faith; a faith, however, that is not a mere in- 
dividual wish but an ought that takes on the character of 
a conviction of the universality of the principle of right- 
eousness. 

Says Kant, “it is of the moral law that we are primarily 
and directly conscious” (p. 31). 

“This law we apprehend by thinking of maxims of the 
will in their form. Thus reason presents the moral law 
as a principle of action, which no sensuous condition can 
outweigh; nay as a principle which is completely independ- 
ent of all sensuous conditions” (p. 31). This supreme law 
of pure practical reason or of righteousness, namely the 
admonition to “act so that the maxims of your will may be 
in perfect harmony with a universal system of laws,” can- 
not be derived from any datum known by reason antece- 
dently to it, as, for instance, the consciousness of freedom. 
It forces itself upon us, as an a priori synthetic proposition, 
which is independent of any perception, either pure or em- 
pirical. It cannot be verified in experience; it may be veri- 
fied “only in the sense that it is the one fact of pure rea- 
son” (pp. 32-33). Kant refers to the principle of morality 
as “prescribing a universal law, which is independent of 
all subjective differences, and which serves as the supreme 
formal ground for the determination of the will. For this 
very reason that principle is a law for all rational beings 
which have a will. Hence it is not restricted to man, but 
holds for all finite beings who have reason and will, and 


includes even the Infinite Being as the Supreme Intelli- 
gence” (p. 34). 

Further: “The moral law leads us to postulate not only 
the immortality of the soul, but the existence of God” (p. 
130). “The highest good is capable of being realized in 
the world, only if there exists a supreme cause of nature 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 12 


aA 


whose causality is in harmony with the moral character 
of the agent” (p. 132). 

Thus, as these quotations bring out, Kant as well as 
Bosanquet feels the appeal of the principle of absolute per- 
fection as rational and self-evident. But with Bosanquet 
the real self-sufficient after all can be the only final stand- 
ard of perfection. The principle of coheréncy applied to 
interpreted experience alone reveals the organic perfection 
of the absolute. The real is not a two-world order but a 
harmony of the whole. The objective is not that which 
is external to the mind or idea. It is not the antithesis of 
subjectivity. It is not social agreement, nor sense data, 
nor lawful sense phenomena, nor a noumenon back of 
phenomena. Rather it is the absolute coherent whole. A 
fact is objective, whether subjective and private or an 
affair of objects and the public, when it is seen in its coher- 
ent setting. Feeling and value, thus, are no less objective 
than are physical or sense data. This position has a vital 
effect on religious interpretation, especially in connection 
with what we have called great religions. With Kant the 
perfect is a demand of the moral ideal, the objective real- 
ity of which “cannot be established by any appeal of theo- 
retical reason either to speculation or to experience.” The 
moral ideal “prescribes a universal law,” that “holds for 
all finite beings who have reason and will, and includes 
even the Infinite Being” (p. 34). We ought to make the 
highest good, i. e., the perfect, the object of our will and 
we should seek to promote it with all our power. Hence 
the possibility of this highest good is thus implied or pre- 
supposed, also the conditions which make it possible, 1. e., 
God, freedom, and immortality. The idea of the ought or 
of duty stands alone. It is an imperial demand of ethical 
loyalty. As an obligation it needs no support from inner 
or outer conditions or from the existence of God though of 
course it must presuppose that “the highest good is pos- 


126 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


sible.” This implication is the ground for the structural 
sufficiency and perfection of the whole, i. e., the obligation 
to realize the “idea of the highest good,” for “it is our duty 
to promote the highest good.” It implies the “supreme 
cause of nature,” the supreme “intelligence and will,” 
namely “God.” 

One thinker therefore appears to hold that the perfect 
is implied in the very nature of the complete rational whole. 
The other finds it implied in the duty or obligation to seek 
the highest good and this implies that which is necessary 
to realize it, namely, the existence of God. To both think- 
ers, real perfection is necessary to the religious ideal; and 
perfection is not a subjective, regulative idea nor an ab- 
stract limit nor the best in a temporary social ideal. 

Both regard perfection as the great religious motiva- 
tion. But to Bosanquet the perfect is the self-sufficient, 
the absolute whereby each particular is what it is because 
of the total set of factors, actual and possible; because the 
sufficient is a whole that includes all pastness and futurity 
as well as the present and all remoteness and immediacy in 
space; because it includes all human preciousness as well 
as relatively non-value facts; because existence is not a 
reality external to the subject as assumed by realists, nor 
a property of the subject, nor a quality of objects foreign 
to possible reals or ideas as Kant supposed was implied in 
the ontological argument for perfection. To argue in the 
manner of Kant that a hundred possible thalers has all the 
marks of a hundred real ones, is to miss the point of the 
ontological argument. Nor is existence a group of condi- 
tions supporting evanescent mind, as believed by natural- 
ists. Existence to Bosanquet is not something that per- 
sists independent of mind, as is implied in various brands 
of realism, nor is it to be identified with the agnostic 
“thing-in-itself.”” Not even persistence of the self as at- 
tested by the cogito ergo sum of Descartes is the prime 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION P22} 


standard of existence. Existence cannot be identified with 
the “is” rather than the “is not,” nor with the present 
rather than the not present, nor with the here rather than 
the there, nor with the particular and so-called concrete 
in preference to the universal. Nor is existence a charac- 
ter of the fulfilled rather than the unfulfilled, nor of the 
static more than the changeful; nor is existence to be con- 
fined to a synoptic phase of experience. Existence is not 
in experience nor is experience in a realm of existence. 
Existence is the synoptic whole, not the synthetic fusion or 
collective whole, of which the parts are distinguishable yet 
in immanent unity with the whole. 

Existence is just the most complete organic whole of all 
factors of reality. An existent is a setting in the supposed 
most complete order. Any fact is an item as it is presumed 
to reside in the most inclusive absolute whole. 

This absolute order contains within it the complete ex- 
planation of all particular events and is the perfect unity 
of all categories and items of reality. Evil is disappoint- 
ment and defeat of a portion of the world, but this in no 
way implies the imperfection of the whole. The latter in- 
volves an order of organic, transcending harmony, analo- 
gous to the triumph of truth over errors and of love in for- 
bearance of inevitable social meanness. This perfection 
is not to be confused with the so-called “composition the- 
ory of evil according to which good and evil, or good and 
evils, may be synthesized into what we may designate as 
higher good.” 

To Bosanquet, the universe is a whole wherein things 
could not have been otherwise, and alternative possibility 
is meaningless. For nothing ought to have been otherwise 
since nothing, considering all the facts, could have been 
otherwise. And yet it is an order wherein finite life, prog- 
ress and betterment is a fact compatible with both absolute 
completion and real change and creative activity, and 


128 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


where good and evil are inseparable and each is meaning- 
less without the other. And yet spirituality is attained by 
loyalty to harmonizing ideals as they rise to victory 
through the principles of conflict, opposition and sacrifice. 
The sacrificial spirit enters into the heart of existence and 
treasures within its bosom the deepest meaning of human 
idealism. 

To Kant, perfection is not so much a rational insight 
into structure as a compelling sense that perfection is the 
demand of the moral life. The perfect, the ought to be, 
must be; it is an order of universality, and makes possible 
the achievement of the moral ideal. 

Thus, while both regard the absolute perfect as a fact, 
they arrive at it in different ways. To Kant the perfection 
takes on the character of an ethical ontological real. The 
very conviction that the moral order is an absolute is the 
root of Kant’s religious thought. The moral order being 
real, its implications as to the character of the world order 
follow. 

After all, the implication of the ethical ontological or 
the satisfying ontological appears to permeate most of 
human thought. Men affirm things will be because they 
know they ought to be. If a thinker feels that a certain 
whole of thought, a certain order and arrangement of the 
data of experience, is the most satisfying, he tends to ac- 
cept it as real—not because he thinks it or merely because 
it is satisfying to him but because of the surety that it is a 
universal, an ontological real. We may be convinced that 
a situation is real because it is practical, and then 
we say, “it is true because it is useful”; or we may say 
it is real because we are sure it is satisfying 
to certain values very precious to human life; real, 
because of a logical harmony, a beauty, an inability to con- 
ceive an otherwise, or because it means progress or gets 
social recognition, social assent, etc. 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 129 


Why should any one feel he has truth when he obtains 
“truths’ cash-value in experiential terms”? Why ask 
“what concrete difference will its being true make in any 
one’s actual life’? Why object to the notion that “when 
you've got your true idea of anything, there’s an end of the 
matter’? To obtain the final truth of a thing does mean 
an end of that truth-search and does mean a conviction as 
to the way of the world. And whether one is a pragmatist, 
an absolute idealist, a naturalist, or a skeptic, he does live 
by just such a lasting conviction as to the way of the cos- 
mos. Why feel confidence in the truths of an idea you can 
verify or that will harmonize with your deepest notions 
and most precious belief? Well! just because cash-values 
in experience, concrete differences in effects, a round of 
satisfaction, verification in the processes of adjustment, all 
point to the fact that the local idea is in harmony with the 
largest available organic whole of fact. The truth of an 
idea consists in its implication of the ontological absolute. 
Even the subjectivism of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum is be- 
lieved to be true only insofar as the self is affirmed to be 
immediate or organic to all time. There can be no moment 
in all eternity in which I doubt but that implies Iam. But 
of course there is still the question of whether I am when- 
ever I doubt not. 

The ontological real involves three great principles: the 
complete, the organic, and the superlative. This complete, 
organic whole is the sufficient real. The absolutist is con- 
vinced that no matter whether one is a skeptic, a pragmat- 


ist, a subjective idealist, an absolute idealist, a pluralist, 
a dualistic supernaturalist, or a realist, all, insofar as they 
are consistent, imply the ontological perfect. The ought- 
to-be of Kant is really an ontological moral perfection 
which, as existing, must therefore imply the conditions of 
its realization, namely, God, immortality and freedom. 


130 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


Supposing that, with the realist, I say, “I see not the 
white page, but only my sensation of the white page, but 
the correspondence of all my other sensations with this 
gives me reason to infer that my sensation represents the 
white page as it really is.” Why this conviction as to the 
representation of the real by perception? My coeviction 
rests on belief that I, in my verification through appeal to 
co-operative sense data, am in unity with an ontological 
absolute. For just to the degree to which I treat all my 
co-operative sense data as merely events restricted to my 
local private self, to that degree I feel I cannot truthfully 
be sure that my sensation of the white page represents a 
real white page. Here then we may say with Royce, “Who- 
ever has a world at all has it as an expression of ideal 
demands.” * And this is one of the cardinal principles of 
religious insight, even to the point where one can Say in 
sublime adoration, “Thy faith hath made thee whole.” 


KAN?T ON RIGHTEOUSNESS AND THE PRINCIPLE OF 
DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE 


With Kant righteousness apparently signifies distribu- 
tive justice according to individual ethical merit and retri- 
bution; a distribution of goods along the pathway of im- 
mortal life according to some general standards of equity 
following the principle of individual and proportional 
moral worth. 

In the field of religion, the principle of individualistic 
justice was not questioned by Kant. The highest objective 
of religion, the focus of the ethical universe to Kant ap- 
pears to be the motiving of universal distributive jus- 
tice. God, he believed, demands holiness “inexorably as a 


duty in order to assign to everyone his exact share in the 
3 Lectures on Modern Idealism, p. 240. 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 18] 


highest good; . . . Created beings can hope to share in 
the highest good only insofar as they are conscious of hav- 
ing stood the test of the moral law” (p. 129). Kant’s prin- 
ciple, “Act so that the maxims of your will may be in per- 
fect harmony with a universal system of laws,’ seemed to 
him in no wise irreconcilable with the belief that by so 
doing one may attain more truly distributive justice. To 
Bosanquet, on the other hand, such a principle would mean 
not necessarily an approximation to the realization of dis- 
tributive justice but rather an appreciation, glory, and in- 
sight into the perfect peace that passeth all understanding, 
and a peace in which man participates by application of the 
principle of love and devotion in experience. And this 
peace, both Bosanquet and Kant would say, cannot be real- 
ized in a world thought of as a mere humanistic, social, or 
pragmatic order. Bosanquet would say that social harmon- 
izing in love or loyal devotion to a cause, to be truly relig- 
ious, must be an expression of an absolute perfection. 
Religion demands real, absolute perfection. On the other 
hand, Kant would say that, to be religious, the peace in 
human experience must express holiness or “perfect har- 
mony of the will with the moral law,” and this implies a 
God who makes possible, in unending life, the harmony of 
happiness and virtue in men and the possibility of perfect 
harmony with the will of God “in infinite duration” “as it 
is surveyed by God alone” (p. 130). 

According to Kant, God demands holiness “inexorably 
as a duty in order to assign every one his exact share in 
the highest good. . . . Created beings can hope to share 
in the highest good only insofar as they are conscious of 
having stood the test of the moral law” (p. 129). Ulti- 
mately, free individualistic moral resolve is the only just 
determinant of man’s place in the scale of advance. If, says 
Kant, “they have advanced from lower to higher degrees 
of morality, and have thus proved the strength of their 


132 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


resolution, they may hope to make unbroken progress in 
the future as long as they live here, and even beyond the 
present life’ (p. 129). To one accustomed to think of dis- 
tributive justice as an inferior rather than as the supreme 
moral law, or to one who is accustomed to feel that the 
very structure of society and of individual difference in 
evaluation forbids the possibility of genuine distributive 
justice, or to one accustomed to conceive the relations of 
punishments and rewards such that no man suffereth unto 
himself and no man can be awarded without altering the 
values of associates, and to one impressed by the multiple 
cosmic conditions that determine the strength of a man’s 
resolution to be holy, Kant’s emphasis of distributive jus- 
tice appears abstract and unreal. 

The ethics of distributive justice, common ethics, the 
righteousness for which the economic, capitalistic, labor, 
legal and social idealistic worlds strive, alike fail miser- 
ably to see that the ultimate and most significant fact of 
moral life is the fact that individuals not only can and do 
suffer for the wrong doing of other individuals, and suf- 
fer because of natural conflicts and repressions of life, bit 
that, because of the structure of life and aspirations, they 
cannot in all eternity escape suffering; they fail to see that 
it is only because men suffer on account of the wrong do- 
ings of others that they are able to do positive good unto 
their fellows, and that natural evil is inevitable so long as 
human life is limited in knowledge and power. If we are 
free to benefit by the action of our fellows we are equally 
made to suffer by virtue of their organic union with our- 
selves. Otherwise there is neither sin nor virtue. No man 
either sinneth or doeth good of himself. Distributive jus- 
tice is merely a makeshift for attaining happiness in a re- 
stricted pragmatic order of localized rights, where loyal- 
ties are relatively selfish and provincial. It cannot be an 
ultimate order. Ultimately the transcending loyalty that 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION BG 


vicariously sacrifices in devotional love for the good of the 
largest social whole, and in adoration of the most high, 
is a superior form of spiritual life. 

In reference to the fact of inner conflict and the way of 
emancipation from evil, Bosanquet stresses more than 
Kant the function of the principle of rationality as a means 
by which man, through readjustment, reconciliation, and 
syntheses, realizes a more or less harmonious non-contra- 
dictory whole. “By identifying the private self not with 
its own achievement but with perfection divined as its true 
individuality the finite attains what he cannot attain in his 
own right, the character of perfection.” * Kant, on the 
other hand, appears to place more stress upon the will-to- 
do. As he said, “created beings can hope to share in the 
highest good only insofar as they are conscious of having 
stood the test of the moral law” (p. 129). 

With Bosanquet there is no way of escape from evil. 
Spirituality is a function of evil, though spirituality must 
never aim to realize the evil. Good and evil are not facts 
that can exist without each other. There is no dualism 
here. Religion, happiness, spirituality, worth of life, must 
never aim to realize the evil. They must necessarily 
be explained not by escape from but by loyalties, har- 
monies, interpretations, that lift life to a vision of the ideal 
by, through, and in spite of the oppression and pain of evil. 
Kant, on the other hand, appears to imply, or at least to 
suggest, a dualism of good and evil. There even is some 
affnity, though not pronounced, with Wm. James’ view 
of evil. In the words of James, “The way of escape from 
evil . . . is not by getting it Aufgehoben, or preserved in 
the whole as an element essential but overcome. It is by 
dropping it out altogether, throwing it overboard and get- 
ting beyond it, helping to make a universe that shall for- 


et its very place and name.”° By way of comparison, we 
y, y us 


4 The Value and Destiny of the Individual, p. 229. 
& Pragmatism, p. 297. 


134 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


find Kant’s phrasing as follows: “The highest good of a 
possible world must therefore consist in the union of virtue 
and happiness, in the same person” (p. 117). “Created 
beings can hope to share in the highest good.” But, says 
Kant, “They can never hope in this life or indeed, at any 
imaginable point of time in the future life, to be in perfect 
harmony with the will of God, but they may hope for this 
harmony in the infinite duration of their existence as it is 
surveyed by God alone” (pp. 129-130). 

To Bosanquet, religion may insure the greatest peace 
and the greatest value of life, but it will not thereby bring 
a happiness of unalloyed comfort. Kant agrees that reli- 
gion gives the greatest peace and the highest value of life 
for only by religion does one attain holiness. But com- 
plete goodness, i. e., the union of sense comfort with vir- 
tue to the elimination of evil is held out as a promise 
of the religious life by way of the surety of immortality 
and the use of the good will. In a sense, Kant could have 
a fellow-feeling for Wm. James when he said, “On prag- 
matic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfac- 
torily in the widest sense of the word it is true.” ® For with 
Kant the hypothesis of God works as a means to the real- 
ization of human duty to promote the highest good; God, 
an existent “cause of nature as a whole which is distinct 
from nature,” is a postulate of the moral law (pp. 130-131). 

But Bosanquet sees no necessity of postulating such a 
theistic God. The perfect is the absolutely self-sufficient, 
and this is a true religious object. The so-called God of 
religious experience is only a phase of the perfect. It is 
“the representative of the universe when considered as 
overcoming evil by good”; the most complete co-ordina- 
tion of the good as seen by humans contrasted with the 
not good. The universe as the perfect is more than a 
whole which includes good and evil forces. It is an organ- 

6 Pragmatism, p. 299. 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 135 


ization of all factors, or perfection. Good and evil are only 
restricted, that is, more or less abstract, aspects of the abso- 
lutely perfect.’ 

Neither the religious monism of Kant nor that of Bosan- 
quet can be described as a “quietism of indifference,” a 
cosmic emotion on which one may lie back in the peace 
of inward security. Rather both thinkers stress the impor- 
tance of the active, achieving life. And neither of them 
treats God exactly after the manner of the absolute of 
theism, namely, as a being who in his creative activity self- 
imposes Jimits on himself. To Bosanquet, such a free act 
on the part of the absolute, the perfect, would be meaning- 
less. For Kant, on the other hand, the absolute, as God, 
expresses his nature to the full by willing to the full the 
conditions of perfect justice in a world of free persons. 


Orie PARLEY. 
LAWRENCE COLLEGE, 


7See The Value and Destiny of the Individual, pp. 250, 391, 311. 


















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Kant’s Purtosopuy or Law 








KANT’S PHILOSOPHY. OF LAW 


HE large significance of the philosophy of Kant turns 

upon the central fact that, after having accepted 
frankly the viewpoint and methods appropriate to modern 
physical science, he was able to vindicate for the moral life 
of man a standing and a power which could not be ex- 
plained away by the metaphysics of materialism. The phys- 
ics of Newton dominates his reading of the phenomena 
of nature; but more significant than the phenomena of nat- 
ure is the attitude and power of the moral will of man. 
Particularly as the moral will of man uncovers the law of 
its true being and reveals that respect for the sanctity of 
personality which is the real heart of all moral living, 
Kant’s mighty thought moves on to its great and central 
theme. It is the thought, in brief, of an ethical idealism; 
of an interpretation of human experience which brings 
strongly into the foreground the validity and power of the 
ideals of ethics. And if this ethical idealism works against 
a background of an almost materialistic interpretation of 
the science of physical nature, that fact may serve to make 
it so much the more significant to the modern mind, which 
assuredly confronts the same type of problem. . 

It is in the light of this blending of ethical idealism 

with naturalistic science that we must interpret, I sup- 
pose, substantially all of Kant’s far-reaching philosoph- 
ical studies. Even the doctrine of the limitations of human 
science, which may frequently appear to us as a mere nega- 
tive agnosticism, had clearly to his mind throughout this 
supreme ethical interest and reference. “I had to make 


140 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


way with science in order to make room for faith.” That 
is, it was necessary to show that the cheapened and washed 
out conceptions of naturalistic science do not go to the 
heart of human experience, in order to make persuasive 
the insight that loyalty to moral ideals is not merely human 
illusion. It is the faith in moral values, then, which is thus 
to be rescued from the shallow materialism that dogs and 
misinterprets the modern science of physical things. 

It is not strange that after Kant, in the spirit thus 
sketched and with his peculiar thoroughness and profund- 
ity, had studied the great outstanding spiritual factors 
known as science and ethics, he should have turned his 
thoughtful attention to that somewhat different plexus of 
human relationships represented by the state, with its or- 
ganized institutions designed to express the spirit of law 
and of justice. The problems that gather about the politi- 
cal relationships of men are manifold, indeed, and had in- 
vited human philosophical reflection from the time of the 
Greeks, as they do now, and must always continue to do. 
To Kant, however, these problems constituted a summons 
to rethink, from the very foundations, the whole meaning 
and implication of the political relationships of men; and 
particularly to apply with thoroughness to these issues the 
well reasoned ethical idealism which constitutes his central 
philosophy and gives to it unity of conception. Kant’s re- 
sponse to this summons, as expressed in various books, 
gives us his Philosophy of the State and of Law. 

We must doubtless regret that the main systematic book 
of this group bears so late a date. The Metaphysical Prin- 
ciples of Law, or Rechtslehre, was published in 1797. At 
that period of his age, however, Kant had lost much in 
point of originality and creative power, so that the volume, 
while strongly reasoned and profound, really contains lit- 
tle which had not appeared in his previous and more scat- 
tered works. Had his strength remained unabated, we 








A Portrait OF KANT 
(Drawn about 1755 by Countess Charlotte Amalia Keyserling) 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF LAW 141 


might have hoped for a much more incisive systematic 
presentation. At the same time, the book is competent, 
and in its main lines it assuredly represents what Kant 
would have meant to say. 

Now the lines of influence which have emanated from 
Kant’s writings on the Philosophy of Law have been 
numerous and important. In order to enable us to gain 
some understanding of the nature of that influence, we 
must first survey a few of his most significant teachings. 
And first, we may study the very conception of law in its 
political sense—what it is, and how it is related to the kind 
of law which morality interprets to us. We have already 
reminded ourselves that Kant’s ethics is the key to his en- 
tire philosophy. How, then, does his Jurisprudence relate 
itself to the Ethics? 

Political laws define duties, as do moral laws; and all 
duties are ultimately moral. Respect for the sacredness 
of personality is implied in all duties. In this sense the 
moral seems ready to shoot through all branches of the 
political, and to dominate the scene entirely. But there 
is an important difference in the nature of the motive im- 
plied in the two—a difference so important, indeed, that it 
results in constituting two fields of vastly different char- 
acter—Ethics and Jurisprudence. Ethical motivation is 
internal. It is the expression of our conscious respect for 
duty, and ultimately of our reverence for the absolute val- 
ue of rational personality. Like the quality of mercy, it 
may not be constrained. Political motivation, on the other 
hand, is external. It seizes upon any influence which is 
likely to be effective in inducing the people to carry out 
the required act, whatever be their inward state of mind. 
Any club is good enough to beat a dog, it is said; and like- 
wise any motive that will give results is available to sus- 
tain a political law. Fear of death, fear of incarceration, 
fear of a money fine—these are characteristic political 


142 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


motives. They are external to the real merits of the act. 
Further, they all have this common quality, that they arise 
from the application of external force. In general, then, 
political duties are such as may be made effective by force, 
and the field of jurisprudence is the field of enforceable 
law; whereas the very essence of a moral act would be 1m- 
paired if it were performed from any such external motive. 

But while this distinction of enforceability separates 
political law from morals, it does but make more acute at 
this stage the philosophical problem that underlies the 
power of the state. Free citizens are not dogs, to be beaten 
into conformity. Indeed, Kant is convinced and declares 
that Freedom is the fundamental right of everyone. ‘“Free- 
dom,” he declares, “is Independence of the compulsory 
will of another; and in so far as it can co-exist with the 
Freedom of all according to a universal Law, it is the one 
sole original, inborn Right belonging to every man in vir- 
tue of his Humanity.” Man has further and highly impor- 
tant spiritual claims which he may make upon the state. 
He may claim equality of treatment, whereby he is not 
bound by others to do anything more than that to which he 
may reciprocally bind them. There are also many other 
claims which rightly grow out of the system of justice in 
which man participates. “But,” Kant adds, “all these 
Rights or Titles are already included in the Principle of 
Innate Freedom, and are not distinguished from it.” Free- 
dom, then, which in its noblest sense is the culmination of 
Kant’s ethics, is also the key to his politics; and if the 
sense is a somewhat different one, it still remains true that 
for him the real basis of the state is essentially moral. 

After studying, then, the conditions under which men 
enter into external relations with one another, and point- 
ing out that in such cases we must needs concern ourselves 
not with the inward wish, but with the overt act, Kant 
summarizes the formal principle which must dominate the 
entire Philosophy of Law as follows: 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF LAW 143 


“Act externally in such a manner that the free exercise 
of thy Will may be able to co-exist with the Freedom of 
all others according to a universal Law.”’ 


In accordance with this thought, then, legal right or 
political law comprehends the whole of the conditions un- 
der which the voluntary actions of any one Person can be 
harmonized in reality with the voluntary actions of every 
other Person, according to a universal Law of Freedom. 
Thus we get the idea of a system of rights and duties, per- 
meated by the spirit of Freedom and addressed to the serv- 
ice of Personalities, but not subject to a merely ethical 
motivation. It is in this way that the state gains its moral 
authority to compel obedience. Indeed, if we but look 
more narrowly, we shall see that the very compulsion 
which the civilized state exercises is itself in the service of 
Freedom. That is, disorderly and unjust living is truly a 
hindrance to real Freedom. The state, then, which puts 
down by force disorder and injustice, is but hindering the 
hindrance of Freedom, and is so far in support of the 
Freedom that exists in accordance with universal laws. 
We do not have, then, a situation in which compulsion is 
exercised by a privileged class entitled to rule, while the 
subjects are merely bound to submission. We have rather 
what Kant calls a universal reciprocal compulsion, in har- 
mony with the Freedom of all. 

We may pause at this stage of our development long 
enough to point out two or three consequences which Kant 
draws from the argument as so far developed. In the first 
place, Law is not a means to some ulterior end such as sur- 
vival or social happiness, or political power. Rather, it has 
its own formal character based upon universality and jas- 
tice. “Let Justice be done though the heavens fall.” Pro- 
fessor Ihering wrote a book entitled Der Zweck im Recht, 
which has been translated into English under the title, 
Law as a Means to an End. But the whole conception that 


144 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


law is simply a means to an ulterior end is highly obnox- 
ious to Kant. To him it seems too much like chaining jus- 
tice to the chariot wheels of economic or dynastic success. 
It is a heterogony of ends, and as such it arouses in his 
nature all the vigor of antagonism which he had previously 
thrown into the battle against hedonism. Kant seemed to 
feel that if this whole system of rights and duties, which 
really reflects the sacredness of personality, should come 
to be regarded as simply means to some ulterior end, such 
as wealth or power, then some fine morning an unusually 
resolute government might tear up all these scraps of 
paper, march through Belgium, trample upon human 
rights, and in general adopt more direct and effective 
means than justice to secure those ulterior and unjust ends. 
Of course, when any particular claim is put forward, there 
is usually some objective in view; but the general form of 
legal right stands fast of itself, and is not a mere means 
to some single end. The import of this contention is ex- 
pressed by our contemporary Kantian jurist Del Vecchiu 
in the following terms: “Law, as well as morals, has its 
principle in the nature or essence of man.” 

A second line of comment starts from the phrase by 
which Kant defines the sphere of state compulsion. The 
hindrance of a hindrance may indeed play into the hands 
of moral progress or self-realization, but it does not delib- 
erately foster and activate such moral progress. Kant, 
then, is strongly opposed to all paternalism on the part of 
the government. The government must not go forth to 
do good to the citizens according to its own method. That 
way lies despotism. On the other hand, the citizens are 
to live their own lives, realize or fail to realize their own 
moral nature according to the quality of their own moral 
motivation. Otherwise he conceives that there is no free- 
dom. On this matter of paternalism he is as essentially 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF LAW 145 


adverse as is John Stuart Mill, but for somewhat different 
reasons. 

A still further consequence of the same movement of 
thought is found in Kant’s opposition to the culture state 
conception. This conception was fostered by Fichte, Hegel, 
and later German Idealism in general. The laws of the 
state are to be systematically used to foster human prog- 
ress, and to aid men in fighting the fight against poverty, 
disease, old age, ignorance, and disorganization. Prob- 
ably the better meaning of German Kultur turns upon this 
theory. But the entire Kulturstaat conception gets cold 
comfort from Kant. He regards it as an attempt to force 
upon people a goodness which must really come from the 
self-determination of their own moral wills. It is a misuse 
of the power of the state, and is a disguised tyranny. Let 
the state restrict its functions to hindering those hindrances 
to freedom which arise in the external actions of men, and 
then let the citizens in private life cultivate character and 
morality. So shall happiness be attained. 

The considerations we have so far touched upon gather 
about Kant’s introductory discussion. If we wish to con- 
tinue the study of Kant’s views concerning the rational 
foundations of the power of the state, we must pass over 
for the present the first part of the Rechtslehre, and come 
at once to the second half. This part deals with Public 
Law, that is, with the system of those laws which require 
a public premulgation in order to produce a juridicial state 
of society. It is there that we get the more explicit think- 
ing of Kant on the essential relation of the individual will 
to civil society, and the treatment of those themes which 
had already engaged the attention of Hobbes and Locke, 
of Spinoza and Rousseau. It is clear that Kant in all this 
is working with explicit reference to the thinking of the 
men just named. I judge that he had more sympathy for 
the teaching of each of them, in this field, than he is accus- 


146 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


tomed to display towards the thinkers of the past. But of 
course his own doctrine re-edits the entire debate under 
the influence of his own dominating philosophy. 

Kant’s doctrine of the state takes on the external form 
of the social contract theory, as had been the case also with 
the writers just mentioned. Indeed, he clearly owes much 
both to Hobbes and to Rousseau. Yet after all the very 
vital differences which Kant introduces into the discussion 
suffice to make a vast change in the character of the the- 
ory. In particular, they give the result that practically all 
of the objections which are regarded today as eliminating 
the social contract theory from political philosophy prove 
to be of no force or effect whatever as against the philoso- 
phy of Kant. 

For instance, it is urged that the social contract was un- 
historical. States are not actually founded that way. But 
Kant admits this point, and even more than admits it. The 
idea of an original contract, he says is “properly only an 
outward mode of representing the idea by which the right- 
fulness of the process of organizing a Constitution may. be 
made conceivable.” “It is vain to inquire into the histori- 
cal origin of the political mechanism, for it is no longer 
possible to discover historically the point of time at which 
civil society took its beginning. Savages do not draw up 
a documentary record of their having admitted themselves 
to law; and it may be inferred from the nature of uncivil- 
ized men that they must have set out from a state of vio- 
lence.” The point about the social contract phraseology is 
that it offers the happiest and most direct manner of plac- 
ing before us the problem of the freedom and true interest 
of the individual citizen in his relation to the common life. 
It may be like what English jurists once called a legal fic- 
tion, but be none the less valuable for that if it states wisely 
the relationships involved. And now, the social contract 
theory does indeed state matters wisely, Kant conceives. 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF LAW 147 


“For however well disposed or favorable to Right men may 
be considered to be of themselves, the rational Idea of a 
state of society not yet regulated by Right must be taken 
as our starting point.” Kant point out that we need not 
think of this state of Nature, so-called, as a state of abso- 
lute Injustice in which human relations are controlled by 
force alone. It might have group life, even family life, 
and even rudimentary property relations. The point. is 
that this natural condition must be regarded, if it ever 
existed, as a state of society that was void of regulation 
by justice, so that if a matter of justice came to be in dis- 
pute no competent judge was found to give an authorized 
legal decision upon it. Such a state of nature would there- 
fore in time become one of insecurity and disorder, and 
it is reasonable for men to strive to pass out of it. Let us 
now follow somewhat closely Kant’s brief account of the 
act by which the civil state is constituted. I quote: “The 
act by which a People is represented as constituting itself 
into a state, is termed the Original Contract. . . . Accord- 
ing to this representation, all and each of the people give 
up their external Freedom in order to receive it immedi- 
ately again as Members of a Commonwealth. The Com- 
monwealth is the people viewed as united altogether into 
a State. And thus it is not to be said that the individual 
in the State has sacrificed a part of his inborn external 
Freedom for a particular purpose; but he has abandoned 
his wild lawless Freedom wholly, in order to find all his 
proper Freedom again entire and undiminished, but in the 
form of a regulated order of dependence, that is, in a Civil 
state regulated by laws of justice. This relation of de- 
pendence thus arises out of his own regulative law giving 
Will.” 

Now Kant’s representation here, as well as in certain 
other passages, has a certain external resemblance to that 
of Hobbes; but in point of essential meaning it is strongly 


148 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


contrasting. In Hobbes, real freedom would consist in the 
power to follow out victoriously the wishes of one’s law- 
less individual will; only, as this proves hopelessly impos- 
sible, it seems expedient to surrender freedom entirely, in 
order to gain security. Hobbes’s view is essentially that 
the state represents the true self-interest of the citizen, an 
enlightened self-interest if you please, by reason of the 
stake which each man has in protecting his own skin. With 
Kant, on the other hand, true freedom is the bringing to 
pass of the Universal nature of man instead of his private 
and special interests. The wild, lawless Freedom, as Kant 
calls it, which each man surrenders, is the spurious and 
illusory interpretation of man’s life, not, as with Hobbes, 
the real essence; and the regulated order of dependence 
within a system of rights and duties, instead of being, as 
with Hobbes, the price which we have to pay to buy pro- 
tection, is for Kant rather the victorious establishment of 
the conditions under which real and true freedom may 
now be brought to pass. For Kant, as for Spinoza, the 
wise man is more free in a system of law that is addressed 
to the establishment of humane ideals than he could pos- 
sibly be when out from under law and wildly prosecuting 
his own separatist interests. Now this all turns upon the 
emphasis by Kant upon the universal nature of man, and 
of course would be utterly impossible for Hobbes. We do 
not find in Kant’s writings, of course, the particular form 
of discussion of the Universal Self or the Real Will with 
which Hegelian writers have made us familiar; but the 
movement of thought in that direction is very close. 
Further, in Hobbes the motive for entering the civil 
state is entirely egoistic. One gains distaste for the mean, 
nasty, and brutish conditions which issue from the war- 
fare of all against all. In Kant, however, there is the rec- 
ognition of a moral obligation to pass from this disorgan- 
ized status. Indeed, he formulates this obligation into a 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF LAW 149 


so-called Postulate of Public Right, as follows: “In the 
relation of unavoidable co-existence with others, thou shalt 
pass from the state of Nature into a juridicial Union con- 
stituted under the condition of a Distributive Justice.’’ 
Deeper, then, than the arbitrary overt decree of the indi- 
‘vidual will that may give or withhold assent to the contract, 
is the moral obligation of civic loyalty which issues from 
the universal will. And this Kant often emphasizes. It 
applies not only to individuals in their relation to the state, 
but also to sovereign states in their relation to a Permanent 
Peace and a Congress of Nations. These also have a duty 
to pass out of their natural state of disorganized aloofness 
which breeds perpetual war, and into an organized system 
of legal institutions which may found a permanent peace. 
In the case of the nations, however, it remains for Kant a 
problem how that can be brought about. 

Now these considerations in Kant’s theory seem to obvi- 
ate another historic objection to the social contract theory 
—that it is a breeder of secession. If the obligation to 
civic loyalty is really more profound than one’s overt deci- 
sion for or against, then secessionism is a mistaken infer- 
ence. lant, indeed, almost overdoes the business of mak- 
ing the contract stick. He rejects not only the right of 
secession from civil society, but also the right of a revo- 
lutionary change of government, no matter how aggravat- 
ing the conditions might become. Somewhat inconsist- 
ently, he provides for an evolutionary reform instituted by 
the sovereign. It is evident, however, that the horrors of 
the French Revolution had impressed him much as they 
did Burke. 

A third common objection to the social contract theory 
is that it is a logical circle in any case. It strives to show 
that we are in duty bound to obey the law because we 
have so contracted. But this assumes the prior bounden 
duty to carry out our contracts, which is itself a product 


150 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


of law. And this would be lifting ourselves by our boot 
straps. Against Kant’s theory, however, this objection 
does not lie, since his fundamental obligation is that to 
the freedom of the rational nature of man, and this obli- 
gation is not a product of the civil law. 

But it is fair to point out, I think, that in so transform- 
ing the social contract theory as to avoid these historic 
difficulties, Kant has really given up the essence of the 
idea of a voluntary contract. Aristotle had long ago taught 
that man is by nature a builder of states, that political goy- 
ernment comes by nature and not by convention; and we 
usually think of Aristotle’s political theory as the great 
opponent, throughout the ages, of the social contract the- 
ory. Now Kant’s view is not that man is social, exactly, 
but rather that he is endowed with a universal nature; and 
the state arises from the attempt to realize this universal 
nature under the conditions of external relations and moti- 
vation. Essentially, then, the state is natural to man. If 
in any sense a product of convention, it is not of a conven- 
tion that is arbitrary and dictated by private interest. We 
may speak of a rational convention, of a compact that ex- 
presses the freedom of man’s true nature and yet binds the 
individual aspects of personality to its more universal in- 
terests. But in fact at such a stage of discussion the spirit 
of Kantianism has burst the shell of the social contract 
speculation, and henceforward it is destined to live its own 
life in the field of political philosophy. 

We may notice only slightly the farther development in 
detail of Kant’s theory of the state. It is evident that he 
looks with interest upon the form adopted by the American 
state, then so recently organized, to which he repeatedly 
refers. The complete separation of the three powers of 
government, executive, legislative, and judicial, he regards 
as an essential bulwark against tyranny, and as sufficient 
for the purpose. An hereditary nobility “is a rank which 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF LAW 151 


takes precedence of merit and is hoped for without good 
reason—a thing of the imagination without genuine real- 
ity. It is impossible that the common will of all the people 
should agree to such a groundless prerogative and hence 
even the sovereign cannot make it valid.”’ Where such 
distinctions exist they should be allowed to fall into abey- 
ance as public opinion matures upon the subject. Thus the 
state will pass from the three-fold division into sovereign, 
nobles, and people, to the two-fold and only natural division 
into sovereign and people. 

The various forms of the state, monarchy, democracy, 
and so forth, Kant considers of minor importance. To a 
certain extent they are simply products of history and the 
habits of the people. This represents the mere letter of 
political philosophy. “But the Spirit of the original con- 
tract contains and imposes upon the constituting power the 
obligation to make the mode of the government conform- 
able to its idea, and if this cannot be effected at once, to 
change it gradually and continuously until it harmonizes 
in its working with the only rightful constitution, which is 
that of a Pure Republic.’’ A republic is the only enduring 
political constitution, he urges, because in it the Law is 
itself sovereign, and is no longer attached to any particu- 
lar person. A republic, then, is the ultimate goal of all 
public laws. 

From the field of private Law I touch upon one point 
only—the theory of private property. This also is re- 
garded by Kant as not simply a means to social ends, but 
as founded in the very nature of personality. The state 
is necessary to provide the securities for property claims, 
to be sure, but the property right is essentially anterior to 
the state, and may not be set aside by the latter. Kant’s 
philosophy in this matter gives no footing whatever for 


Bolshevism. 


Ls IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


If we turn now from our survey of Kant’s Rechtslehre 
to a brief notice of the methods by which it has taken effect 
upon the history of human thought, we may distinguish 
two such methods, one direct and one indirect. Its direct 
influence has been through the writings of scholars of the 
Kantian school in general, and of Kantian jurists in par- 
ticular. Such scholars have always existed. They are 
existent today, are even active and vigorous, although 
among jurists not in large numbers. I may cite for exam- 
ple from this list at present the name of the incisive and 
able young jurist of the University of Bologna, Professor 
Del Vecchio. His volume on The Formal Bases of Law 
has been translated as the representative of the Neo-Kan- 
tian theory of jurisprudence in the Modern Legal Philoso- 
phy Series which is sponsored by Dean Wigmore and 
others. His writings, however, extend far beyond this vol- 
ume. Del Vecchio concedes little to the followers of Fichte 
or Hegel in matters of fundamental political philosophy, 
and almost nothing to the followers of Positivism and the 
sociological movement. The general result of his studies 
is to carry the spirit and principles of Kant’s philosophy 
far into the details of present day law and jurisprudence. 

It is my personal opinion, however, that the indirect in- 
fluence of Kant’s thought has been already far greater 
than the direct, and that this is likely to continue to be 
increasingly true. The indirect influence was in part 
through the writings of Fichte, Hegel, and other apostles 
of German Idealism. But here the German development 
contrasts with Kant in many important respects In Eng- 
land, however, the development of the philosophy of politi- 
cal idealism, while stimulated indeed by the post-Kantian 
thinkers, has been more sympathetic with Kant’s reserva- 
tions than in Germany. Works like T. H. Green’s Lec- 
tures on the Principles of Political Obligation and Bernard 
Bosanquet’s Philosophical Theory of the State remain true 


KANT’S PHILOSOPHY OF LAW PS3 


to much that is central and essential in Kant’s philosophy, 
while they systematically change the things that must be 
changed. They do not concede as much to the conception 
of the culture state as do the German writers, and in prac- 
tical political effect are nearer to the traditions of English 
Liberalism than they are to German Kultur. But the in- 
fluence of these English thinkers is remarkably pervasive 
today, and even writers who, like Professor Hobhouse, are 
actively criticizing some aspects of the theorizing of Green 
and Bosanquet, are still more than two-thirds under the 
influence of their thinking. 

The thing that delivers Kant’s political philosophy over 
to a thorough restatement at the hands of writers like 
Green and Bosanquet is his inadequate treatment of teleol- 
ogy in the realm of moral and social matters. In attempting 
to say that personality should not be a means to impersonal 
ends, Kant was led to make declarations which implied 
that morality and law were not means to amy end, but sim- 
ply exemplified a formal law, sacred and inexorable. Its 
effect upon his theory of punishment, for example, was 
notorious. “Even if a Civil Society resolved to dissolve 
itself with the consent of-all its members,” he writes, “the 
last murderer lying in the prison ought to be executed be- 
fore the resolution was carried out. This ought to be done 
that everyone may realize the desert of his deeds, and that 
bloodguiltiness may not remain upon the people; for other - 
wise they might all be regarded as participators in the 
murder as a public violation of Justice.” Now it is clear 
that such a formalistic treatment, which completely ex- 
cludes all appreciation of moral purpose, is inconsistent 
with modern social thinking on such matters. And while 
in many respects one may judge that modern social theory 
could learn a great deal from Kant, yet in this fundamen- 
tal respect it is evident that Kant must himself be revised. 


154 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


But it has proved possible to carry out such a revision 
while remaining true to the central aspirations of the Kan- 
tian political philosophy; and with a brief restatement of 
what we should conceive those central aspirations to be, 
we may conclude our present study. 

Kant is setting forth the idea of a liberty which is real- 
ized in and through a system of Law. The law may be 
coercive and external, indeed, but it is imbued with the 
spirit of humanitarian ideals, and is really addressed to the 
protection of the sanctity of personality. In such a system 
of law the individual loses, indeed, his wild, lawless free- 
dom, but that is only a misinterpretation and a mistake in 
any event. He gains the power to give effect to the uni- 
versal and far-reaching potentialities of his nature, and the 
institutions which give scope and security for the opening 
up of such interests, and the bringing of them into actuality 
are spiritual indeed. We must repudiate, then, the suppo- 
sition that force or craft is the ultimate explanation of the 
institutions of the state, or that the loyalties they demand 
from the individual are simply external impositions which 
curtail his freedom. 

If it is true indeed, as it sometimes seems, that the les- 
son of liberty under law is the hardest lesson for young 
America to learn in such wise as really to believe it, per- 
haps we may do well to ponder more deeply than we have 
been accustomed to do on the meditations of the deep- 
thinking Kant concerning this great problem. 


E. L. HInMAN. 
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA. 


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Doctrines ConcERNING PERPETUAL PEACE 





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KANT’S DOCTRINES CONCERNING PERPETUAL 
PEACE 


I 


ANT’S doctrine of perpetual peace is neither a 
momentary nor an incidental thought. The two 
writings in which it is most fully expressed, the /dea of a 
Universal History and the essay On Perpetual Peace, be- 
tween them span the greater part of the critical period of 
Kant’s thinking. The Jdea of Universal History appeared 
in 1784, only three years after the Critique of Pure Reason, 
and Perpetual Peace appeared eleven years later, in 1795, 
only two years before the Rechtslehre, the last important 
contribution to Kant’s system. Nor do these writings 
stand alone. There are allusions to the same doctrine in 
several of his other writings, though nowhere else is it so 
fully worked through. The doctrine is not incidental; it 
is a constituent part of Kant’s system, organically related 
to his most fundamental conceptions, and in one aspect the 
very capstone of the whole. Kant has suffered greatly in 
the comprehension of his readers because they often stop 
too soon. To get the full scope of his view one must not 
only go beyond the Critique of Pure Reason—that goes 
without saying—though some of his critics have shown an 
extraordinary unreadiness to pass beyond it. One must 
also supplement the doctrines of the practical reason and 
the teleological judgment with the conception of a goal of 
civilization as expressed in the doctrine of perpetual peace. 
This is from one point of view the climax of the other doc- 


158 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


trines. It is the purpose of this paper to explain this con- 
ception and show its connection with the main body of 
Kant’s system; and to suggest some points of connection 
in it with the present world situation. 

There is for Kant an analogy between the formation of 
the civil state, which is necessary for any organized soct- 
ety, and the formation of a universal civil order, which is 
the goal of civilization. It will be necessary to examine 
first in some detail the formation of the civil state, and then 
to ask in what respects the formation of a world order 
must be like it and in what respects it must be different. 


II 


{n his theory of the formation of the civil state Kant 
follows very closely the lines laid down by Thomas Hobbes. 
His view of the state of nature and the social contract are 
in substance the same. In this respect he is much nearer 
to Hobbes than to Locke or Rousseau. He is nearer to 
Hobbes because he shares Hobbes’ view of human nature. 
Kant indeed adds to Hobbes’ conception of man’s nature 
a profoundly important element of reason. For Kant there 
are two sides of human nature—or perhaps better two 
levels—the natural and the rational, which are almost com- 
pletely separated from each other. And it is perhaps be- 
cause Kant’s conception of the natural man was so com- 
pletely identical with that of Hobbes that he was compelled 
to push the rational man so far over into another world. 
Remembering always that man’s nature for Kant is also 
rational—indeed that the rational is the real man—we can 
ask provisionally what kind of being the natural man is. 

The natural man is selfish. He is moved by impulse to 
respond to the circumstances in which he is placed, includ- 
ing the presence of his fellow men. He follows his desires, 
which bring him into constant collision with others. Yet 

















View Across THE RIVER PREGEL 


(At the Old University (left); The City Gymnasium (right) ; to the rear, 
the Cathedral ) 


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KANT CONCERNING PERPETUAL PEACE 159 


he needs his fellows; for his three overmastering desires 
are love of glory, love of power, and love of gain, and he 
must use his fellow men as his instruments in the attain- 
ing of these ends. But these aims are competitive. As 
he would use others in pursuing honor, power, or wealth, 
so they would use him. Such a state therefore is one of 
constant collision. It is a state of war. Though hostilities 
may cease for a time, there is no guarantee that peaceful 
relations will continue. But the insecurity and pain which 
this hostility entails thwart in turn the very impulses that 
lead to rivalry. So the play of these natural propensities 
leads to an equilibrium of impulses, an “unsocial sociality.” 
Men have to learn to get on with each other. This does 
not however signify any change in the natural impulses. 
Kant is deeply pessimistic as he views man in the natural 
order of life. Man’s impulses remain as selfish as before, 
but through mutual adjustment they grow less self-defeat- 
ing. The system of adjustments into which man is forced 
by his conflicting and competitive impulses constitutes the 
order of civil society. By accepting the mutual limitations 
of a social order men make themselves actually less limited. 
This is the nature of the social contract. 

But such a description of the course of man’s natural 
adjustments is purely empirical. However far it be car- 
ried, it can only point out the desires at work, the condi- 
tioning circumstances, and the results attained. It could 
never show in these any moral value or authority. Moral 
authority has its origin in the deeper level of man’s rational 
nature. If man takes his commands from circumstances, 
if he follows his desires, if he seeks external ends, he is 
merely living his natural life as an animal. Indeed his 
natural life is more chaotic than the animal’s because less 
guided by instinct. Moral authority must be within, and 
wholly independent of conditions. Now the only law that 
can bind the will in complete independence of all other 


160 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


conditions is the law of consistency. That sets our supreme 
duty and our only duty. | 

It is this rational authority in man that Hobbes com- 
pletely ignores. The account of the play of human im- 
pulses in making society is substantially the same ‘5 
Hobbes as in Kant. But Hobbes has no moral criterion 
by which to judge it. The social contract is for him only 
a vast expediency. For their mutual advantage men agree 
to subordinate their rights to the absolute authority of a 
sovereign, and Hobbes is sure that to submit to that 
authority, however tyrannous, would always be more ex- 
pedient than to rebel. But beyond the principle of expedi- 
ency he cannot go. Kant on the contrary brings the social 
contract, and every legal institution emerging under it, to 
the bar of reason, pronounces judgment on them, and if they 
are found rational acknowledges toward them the author- 
ity of duty. Duty for Hobbes is secondary. He finds it 
only in the external commands of a sovereign; but the 
whole social system which establishes and maintains the 
sovereign is itself the product of ultimate expediency. Kant 
completely separates expediency and duty, confining expe- 
diency entirely to the domain of the natural life, and duty 
entirely to the rational will within. 

In this way Kant passes entirely beyond Hobbes in the 
meaning he gives to the order of the civil state. It becomes 
a system of law required by reason. The social contract 
is no longer merely a highly useful device for securing 
natural ends; it is also an Idea of Reason, and makes a 
valid claim on every citizen “as if he had given his per- 
sonal assent to such a will.”” The requirements of the civil 
order embody “legal right,’ which is just the compass of 
the conditions on which the independent will of one can be 
united with the independent will of another according to 


a universal law of freedom. Just laws are those that the 


KANT CONCERNING PERPETUAL PEACE 161 


citizen can be conceived as consistently enacting for all, 
including himself. 

In the same way Kant justifies the use of compulsion by 
the state, its exercise of police power. For Hobbes—abso- 
lutist though he is—compulsion is justified only as the 
lesser of two evils; in the expediency of the natural order 
of life it is better than anarchy. But Kant justifies it on 
moral grounds. It is really self-compulsion and at the 
same time the fullest expression of one’s own freedom. To 
be truly free is to be rationally—that is consistently—free. 
To be consistently free is to will for oneself only what at 
the same time one wills for others. The institutions of civil 
society are our own so far as we are reasonable selves. 

The law of reason as Kant conceives it is often called 
subjective or individual; and this is true in one aspect, be- 
cause each person is responsible for his own will alone. But 
in another aspect the law of reason is objective and univer- 
sal; because in the first place it makes the same demand 
upon the will of every one (though for each one from 
within) ; and in the second place the demand of reason is 
one of sheer, formal consistency, which brings the self 
under the same universal rule as all other selves. 

This formal and non-empirical character of reason, 
which I have stated most inadequately, is of course much 
more fully worked out in the Critiques. But it is impor- 
tant here because in the conception of a vocation and goal 
of the human race it is carried to its farthest possible ex- 
pression. Indeed, it seems to me that just here more clearly 
perhaps than anywhere else we see Kant’s dualism 
stretched beyond the breaking point, so that the phenom- 
enal and the noumenal orders spill over into each other. 

To revert now to Kant’s idea of the social contract, did 
he understand that it actually took place as a specific event 
in time? No, not in any crudely unhistorical sense. He, 
like Hobbes, took it rather as a legal device for justifying 


162 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


the continuance of the social order. Yet Kant came very 
much nearer than Hobbes to giving the social contract a 
genuinely historical meaning. Hobbes had essentially no 
philosophy of history. Both his state of nature and his 
social contract were recognized fictions, designed to give 
logical validity to the state. But when he once conceives 
the state as established, it is essentially static. He is inter- 
ested in expounding and supporting it rather than develop- 
ing it. No doubt he would improve details, but in principle 
he has no theory of human progress. This brings us to 
another very important advance of Kant over Hobbes. 

For Kant does have a philosophy of history. He sees 
man gradually building up a social order. Projecting this 
process backward, he sees the state of nature and the social 
contract as very nearly literal events. Projecting the proc- 
ess forward, he sees as the goal a world society completely 
ordered under law, the ultimate duty of man. Now the 
interesting thing about this process of history for Kant is 
that reason is found—or almost found—to be operating in 
it. The events of history belong of course to the natural 
order of man’s life. They are purely empirical, they are 
still incomplete, and so they cannot possibly prove the oper- 
ation of any rational principle. Nevertheless they suggest 
such a principle. They move on as if there were an over- 
ruling purpose in them. The idea of this purpose is not 
derived, at least not conclusively derived, from the facts 
of history; it is an idea of reason which we think into the 
facts. But when we do think it in we find that it fits mar- 
vellously well. This is of course but a new form of the 
teleological judgment, and Kant could never have admitted 
that it gives real knowledge. It is an act of faith. Never- 
theless he is so sure of the idea, he follows it out with such 
enthusiasm, he personifies Nature and traces out her vast 
purpose for man with such abandon, that faith has clearly 
done its perfect work. 


KANT CONCERNING PERPETUAL PEACE 163 


History reveals man as a natural being, a natural being 
in whom a moral life is being realized. But this is revealed 
only by history as a whole. This is what Kant means by 
“universal history on a cosmopolitan plan.” It reveals 
rational purpose only on a grand scale, a purpose that is 
not at all identical with any purpose which moves men in 
the particular events of history, a purpose that could never 
be discovered in the natural life of any individual. Kant 
has little respect for this natural life of men. He calls it 
“disgusting.” It fails to attain much happiness, or to be- 
come worthy of happiness. Yet, through it all, men are 
building better than they know. The life of mankind is 
more than the sum of the lives of all men; it is a continu- 
ous structure, like a single, long life in which rational pur- 
pose gradually controls. 

How shall we state the end that seems thus to run 
through history? It is the development of all the powers 
of man in subordination to the law of reason. Man’s weak- 
ness, the limited provision which nature makes for his 
wants, his necessary reliance upon his own efforts, all force 
him toward this end. “It seems as if nature cared not at 
all that he should live happily, but only that he should dis- 
cipline and develop himself. . . . In the course of history 

. earlier generations seem to carry on their thankless 
efforts only on account of those that follow, laboring, as 
it were, to prepare a stage on which they can raise to a 
higher point the edifice designed by nature; so that only 
the latest comers can have the good fortune of inhabiting 
the dwelling which the long series of their predecessors 
have toiled, though without any conscious intent, to build 
up. But... this. . . is necessary if we once assume it 
was intended that a species of animals endowed with rea- 
son should exist, and that, as a species (which is immortal, 
though al! individuals in it die), they were to attain the 


164 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


full development of all their capacities.” (H)’ 

What, again, is the means which nature uses toward 
this rational end? It is man’s natural behavior which we 
have seen to be so hopelessly irrational. ““The means which 
nature uses to bring about the development of all man’s 
capacities, is the antagonism of these very capacities as 
they are manifested in society, an antagonism which in 
the end is turned into a means for the establishment of 
social order.” (H). Men have an inclination to isolate 
themselves, because of their competitive desires for pleas- 
ure; but also an inclination to associate themselves, be- 
cause they need each other to satisfy their most urgent 
desires. ‘‘Now it is just this resistance which awakens 
man’s powers, . . . and which drives him, in the lust for 
honor, power, and riches, to win for himself a rank among 
his fellow men with whom he cannot live at peace, yet wishi- 
jut whom he cannot live at all.” “The natural impulses 
which prompt this effort . . . are . . . the spurs which 
drive him to the development of his powers.” “Without 
these, in themselves by no means lovely, qualities which 
set man in social opposition to man, so that each finds his 
selfish claims resisted by the selfishness of all the others, 
men would have lived on in an Arcadian shepherd life, in 
perfect harmony, contentment, and mutual love; but all 
their talents would have remained forever hidden and 
undeveloped. Thus, as gentle as the sheep they tended, 
they would have given to their existence a value scarcely 
greater than that of their cattle. And the place among the 
ends of creation which was left for the development of 
rational beings would not have been filled.” (H). 

The end of nature, then, is the development of man’s 
powers under the law of reason; the means, the equilibrium 


1 The quotations in this paper marked “H” are from the Idea of History; 
those marked “P” are from Perpetual Peace. These works are so short, and 
the editions and translations so differ in paging, that it does not seem neces- 
sary to give page references. 


KANT CONCERNING PERPETUAL PEACE 165 


of antagonisms. The special form which the problem 
takes is the attainment of civil society. “The history of 
the human species as a whole may be regarded as the un- 
ravelling of a hidden plan of nature for accomplishing a 
perfect civil constitution for society . . . as the sole state 
of society in which the tendencies of human nature can ail 
be fully developed.” (H). 


IIT 


Let us now revert to the analogy, spoken of at the be- 
ginning of our discussion, between the formation of sepa- 
rate civil societies, and the formation of a universal society. 
To Kant’s mind the whole process of history falls rather 
definitely into these two parts. It is true that he recog- 
nizes successive steps of tentative experiment and gradual 
development within each of these; but without blurring 
the comparison and contrast of the two. The national units 
of modern Europe are taken for granted as a halting place. 
They are not yet perfected, but fairly completed forms of 
civil government; no one now lives outside a civil state. 
And they are the units out of which in turn a world order 
must be formed. Therefore to Kant’s mind we are now at 
a middle point in history, in transition between the com- 
pletion of one kind of civil unit and the beginning of an- 
other, the one nearly finished and the other scarcely begun. 
There is a considerable analogy between the two processes. 
Kant’s most important thoughts here can most easily be 
brought out by comparing the two. 

There are several points of analogy that appear at once. 
First, the natural relation between states as well as be- 
tween individuals is one of war. Second, both must enter 
into relations of freedom-giving law. Third, the means 
by which nature stimulates both to enter a civil order is 
mutual antagonism, rivalry, and the equilibrium of inter- 


166 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


ests, in the one case between individuals, in the other case 
between states. Fourth, nature’s purpose is in both an 
overruling one, beyond the intention of the participants. 
Fifth, the ultimate worth of a civil order in both cases lies 
in providing a field for the development of man’s capacities. 
I cannot forbear quoting three passages—in somewhat 
condensed form—which illustrate these several points. 
The first is from the essay on Perpetual Peace. “For states, 
in their relation to one another, there can be according to 
reason no other way of advancing from that lawless con- 
dition which unceasing war implies, than by giving up 
their savage lawless freedom, just as individual men have 
done, and yielding to the coercion of public laws.” Kant 
also speaks of nature as “the great artist, in whose mechan- 
ical course is clearly exhibited a predetermined design to 
make harmony spring from the discord of men, even 
against their wills.” The second passage is from the / dea 
of Universal History. “The establishment of a perfect 
constitution of society depends upon the problem of inter- 
national relations adjusted to law. . . . To what purpose 
is labor bestowed upon a civil constitution adjusted to law 
for individual men, that is upon the creation of a common- 
wealth? The same antisocial impulse which first drove 
men to such a creation is again the cause that every com- 
monwealth, in its external relations—that is, as a state in 
reference to other states—occupies the same ground of 
lawless and uncontrolled liberty; consequently each must 
anticipate from the other the very same evils which com- 
pelled individuals to enter the social state. Nature accord- 
ingly utilizes the spirit of enmity in man, as existing even 
in his national corporation, for the purpose of attaining 
through this antagonism a state of rest and security. By 
wars, by the exhaustion of incessant preparation for war, 
and by the pressure of evil consequences which war at 
last entails upon any nation even in time of peace, she 


KANT CONCERNING PERPETUAL PEACE 167 


drives nations to all sorts of experiments and expedients: 
and finally, after infinite devastations, ruin, and exhaus- 
tion, to one expedient which reason should have suggested 
without so sad an experience, viz., to quit the barbarous 
condition of lawless power, and to enter into a federal 
league of nations, in which even the weakest member looks 
for its rights and its protection not to its own power, or its 
own adjudication, but to this great confederation, to the 
united power, and the adjudication of the collective will.” 
The third passage likewise is from the Idea of Universal 
History. “Hard as it may be to realize such an idea, states 
must of necessity be driven at last to the very same reso- 
lution to which the savage man of nature was driven with 
equal reluctance—viz., to sacrifice brutal liberty, and to 
seek peace and security in a civil constitution founded upon 
law. All wars therefore are so many tentative essays (not 
in the intention of Man but in the intention of Nature) to 
bring about new relations of states, and by revolutions and 
dismemberments to form new political bodies. These 
again, either from internal defects or external attacks, 
cannot support themselves, but must undergo similar revo- 
lutions; until at last, partly by the best possible arrange- 
ment of civil government within, and partly by common 
concert and legal compact without, a condition is attained 
which, like a well ordered commonwealth, can maintain 
itself in the way of an automaton.” Some of Kant’s words 
in 1784 sound fresh and familiar in 1924! 

There is an error that we must not make in reading such 
passages as these. We must not suppose that Kant justi- 
fies war. For a sixth point that we may add, in reference 
to this analogy between the two levels of social construc- 
tion, is that Kant in both cases condemns the selfish antag- 
onisms by which men drive each other into a civil order. 
Nature, it is true, so overrules these antagonisms as to get 
beneficial results out of them, but this does not in the least 


168 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


redeem their evil character. Under Nature’s purpose 
these offenses must needs come, but woe unto them by 
whom they come! Nature’s purpose is transcendental. It 
is no part of the order of nature. It is an Idea of Reason 
which we are forced to assume, as if the order of nature 
were thus controlled. But each individual act of selfish- 
ness or war we are required by reason to condemn. Kant 
has much to say of the radical evil in human nature, and 
he is unsparing in his condemnation of war. If he pos- 
sibly goes too far in his appreciation of the incidental good 
effects of war—his adherence to Hobbes’ view of the for- 
mation of the civil state naturally led him to that—he never 
shares the Bernhardi sort of moral praise of war that has 
been all too common both in his day and in ours. On the 
contrary he attributes war simply to man’s depravity. He 
draws an interesting contrast between the two levels of 
social organization in this respect. “The depravity of 
human nature,” he says, “shows itself without disguise in 
the unrestrained relations of nations to each other, while 
in the law-governed civil state much of this is hidden by 
the check of government.” (P.) 

The obverse of this last point, in the seventh place, is 
that it is a positive duty to abandon the state of war, be- 
tween both individuals and nations. ‘Reason, from her 
throne of the supreme law-giving moral power, absolutely 
condemns war as a morally lawful proceeding, and makes 
the state of peace, on the other hand, an immediate duty. 
Without a compact between the nations, however, this 
state of peace cannot be established or assured. Hence, 
there must be the kind of alliance which we may call a 
covenant of peace, which would differ from a treaty of 
peace in this respect that the latter merely puts an end to 
one war, while the former would seek to put an end to 
war for ever.” (P.) “That a people should unite into a 
state . . . of freedom and equality . . . is a principle not 


KANT CONCERNING PERPETUAL PEACE 169 


based on expediency, but on duty.” (P.) He speaks of 
perpetual peace as a Pflichtbegriff, a morally imperative 
ideal. It is an idea “which reason directly prescribes to 
us.” Thus the overruling purpose which reason leads us 
to read into history turns out to be precisely identical with 
the law of duty which reason prescribes to our own wills. 
It is in this respect that Kant’s doctrine of perpetual peace 
forms the capstone of his system. The highest possible 
Idea of Reason that we read into the field of knowledge is 
this one that compasses the whole of that knowledge, the 
complete course of history, future as well as past. And 
the highest possible duty resting on the will of man is to 
take the final step in the ordering of life under law. But 
the two are one. There is a single goal set for both man 
and nature. Here at last the phenomenal and the noum- 
enal coalesce. The last word of each is the same word, 
This paper is intended as an exposition, not a criticism, 
of Kant’s doctrine. But I should like to digress for a 
moment to suggest that a fruitful criticism of Kant’s dual- 
ism might well begin at just this point. Here his dualism 
reaches its farthest extension and at the same time comes 
nearest to being overcome. Just here the phenomenal and 
the noumenal might be pushed over into each other and 
made to coalesce. Their relation could then be based on 
an entirely new principle which could be carried back to 
reconstruct the whole critical system. In the absolutist 
direction this has been done by the rational idealists, the 
classical example being the stupendous work of Caird in 
reconstructing the Kantian system so as to submerge its 
dualism in the Absolute. I suspect that a still more fruit- 
ful reconstruction could be made in the opposite direction 
of instrumentalism. A thoroughly naturalistic recon- 
struction could be made in the opposite direction of instru- 
mentalism. A thoroughly naturalistic reconstruction of 
Kant might prove more sound than the absolutistic one. 


170 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


The significant distinctions of the Kantian system would 
be reinterpreted as functional. Reason would no longer 
dictate moral values to experience, but would be instru- 
mental in constructing higher levels of value within expe- 
rience. Duty and expediency would no longer be divorced 
from each other, but would be successive reaches on the 
same scale, expediency deepened by its responsibilities 
and duty charged with vital content. The goal of history, 
conceived as the development of man’s powers in the con- 
struction of a universal order of society, would be, not a 
transcendentally determined idea of reason imposed on 
the temporal series of events, but an empirically developed 
purpose suggested by the events themselves, and rein- 
forced by that systematic portrayal of them that consti- 
tutes history. If it could be shown that Kant in fact ob- 
tained this doctrine of perpetual peace, the capstone of his 
system, in just this functional manner, there would seem 
to be no better starting point than this for an instrumental- 
ist re-interpretation of the whole system. And our own 
practical relation to the pursuit of the goal of history would 
be better understood in this way. 

For, returning from this critical digression, we must 
note as an eighth point that Kant locates us at a definitely 
empirical point in the process of history. The two stages 
of social organization are curiously related, in that we in 
our age unfortunately fall between the two. “Before this 
last step is taken’—the step of world federation—‘“the 
human race, then about half way advanced in its progress, 
is in the deepest abyss of evils under an illusive show of 
external well being; and Rousseau was perhaps not so 
far wrong when he prefered the condition of the savage 
to that of the civilized man at the highest point where he 
has reached, but is hesitating to take, the final step of his 
ascent.” Again, “in this delusive condition will the human 
race linger, until it shall have toiled upwards in the way 


KANT CONCERNING PERPETUAL PEACE b/ 1 


I have mentioned from its present chaotic abyss of political 
relations.” (H.) 

In the ninth place, when we ask what form of world 
organization Kant contemplates, we find him not entirely 
consistent. Sometimes he speaks of it as a single world 
state, exactly analogous to the civil government of the 
nation. But this is rather when he is emphasizing the 
general principle of civil order involved in human progress. 
When, however, he is concerned with methods and prac- 
tical details, he holds back from any such consummation; 
a federation of states is then all that he is willing to en- 
dorse. He appreciates the difficulties of effective federa- 
tion, and discusses some of them acutely, but he is so sen- 
sitive to the deadening effects of too widely centralized a 
government that he rejects a world state in favor of a 
federation. About many aspects of a world federation his 
opinion either is not clear, or varies. But on several fun- 
damental matters he is quite clear. He sees that nations must 
be in a state of war, actual or latent, unless they “yield to 
the coercion of public laws.” (P.) He sees that the only con- 
dition reconcilable with the individual freedom of nations 
is something of the nature of a federation for the purpose 
of doing away with war. (P.) He sees the ultimate futil- 
ity of treaties without such a general rule of law. He sees 
that any coercive power given to a world federation must 
be, not military, but analogous only to the police power 
which gives security within the civil government. (H.) 
He sees that a genuine law of nations must mean the out- 
lawry of war, for “there is no intelligible meaning in the 
idea of the law of nations as giving a right to make war.” 


(P.) 


172 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


IV 


Does Kant regard the goal of world federation as actu- 
ally attainable? In one passage he says positively that it 
is an ideal that cannot be realized, though a continual 
approximation to it is possible and is our duty. But usu- 
ally his tone is more confident. His hope rests partly 
on a priori grounds. “The morally bad . . . is in contra- 
diction with itself; it counteracts its own natural effect, 
and thus makes room for the moral principle of good.” 
(P.) Again, reason must be capable of subduing the 
natural. This is true subjectively; what is our duty must 
be possible. And it is true objectively; “it is the irresist- 
ible will of nature that right” (that is, “internal and exter- 
nal peace’’) “‘shall at last get the supremacy.” (P.) But 
his confidence rests also upon empirical grounds. Though 
he never underestimates the difficulty of the undertaking 
(for he thinks that the second great step in civil govern- 
ment will be even more difficult than the first), he sees 
many signs of a new day internationally. Kant says that the 
governments are beginning, under the pressure of the evils 
of war, and “under a sense of their own danger, . 
though as yet without any authentic sanction of law, . . . 
to prepare all things from afar for the formation of a great 
primary state-body . . . such as is wholly unprecedented in 
all preceding ages. Although this body at present exists 
only in rude outline, yet already a stirring is beginning to 
be perceptible in all its limbs, each of which is interested in 
the maintenance of the whole. Even now there is enough 
to justify a hope that, after many . . . remodellings . . . 
the supreme purpose in nature will be accomplished in the 
establishment of a cosmopolitan state, as the bosom in 
which all the original tendencies of the human species are 
to be developed.” (H). 


KANT CONCERNING PERPETUAL PEACE 173 


How can we further the trend toward this goal? Sev- 
eral of the suggestions already quoted have a bearing here. 
But others should be mentioned. Broadly stated, Kant 
would have us avoid everything which would make the 
state of nature—the state of actual or possible war-perma- 
nent; and, even in the state of nature, to act on the princi- 
ples from which a lasting peace is most likely to spring. He 
believes that we can anticipate and accelerate the move- 
ment. In particular he makes several concrete proposals 
which he calls articles of perpetual peace. Some of them 
are naturally superseded now, but several of them are 
vividly before our minds today. I have left myself time 
only to list some of these in barest outline, and to throw in 
some parenthetic remarks, which I hope may not seem flip- 
pant, but may suggest how modern and fresh they are. 

KKant proposes that standing armies be gradually but 
altogether abolished; that no mercenary troops be hired 
from a neutral state; that too great an accumulation of 
treasure for military purposes be avoided; that no national 
debts be contracted in connection with international affairs; 
that free access be given to all people into every state; 
that weaker nations be not subjected to economic exploi- 
tation by stronger ones; that no state whether great or 
small having an independent existence be acquired by an- 
other through inheritance, exchange, purchase, or gift; 
that no policy be legal that is not capable of full publicity . 

Free discussion of public policies shall be permitted to 
philosophers; that is, to thinkers in distinction from poli- 
ticians (Kant thinks philosophers are so obviously incap- 
able of sedition that when they discuss war policies ad- 
versely no espionage act should get them). 

No state at war with another shall countenance such 
modes of hostility as would make mutual confidence im- 
possible in a subsequent state of peace; such are breaches 
of capitulation, assassination, instigating treachery in the 


174 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


hostile state, and the use of spies. (Until ten years ago 
we supposed that this idea of Kant was sound, and that 
there could be such a thing as international laws of war. 
Some believe it still. But have we not learned that we are 
no longer able to outlaw bad methods of war except by 
outlawing war? Military necessity knows no law. It must 
have all or nothing. When war is once on, no methods 
are too cruel, too destructive, or too treacherous. And the 
result Kant feared has come to pass, that in a subsequent 
state of peace it is hard to regain mutual confidence. ) 

No treaty of peace shall be held valid if made with the 
secret reservation of material for a future war. (Secret 
treaties are to be replaced by pitiless publicity. ) 

The civil constitution of each state shall be republican. 
(By republican Kant meant representative constitutional 
government, under whatever form. He saw clearly, ana 
discussed in much detail, what some supporters of our 
present League of Nations perhaps do not see, that a 
league can scarcely rise in character above the dominant 
governments that make it up, and that the problem ot 
securing rational world confederation abroad is largely 
the problem of securing liberal governments at home. To 
illustrate: so far as the aim of perpetual peace is concerned, 
Herriot we might hope to be better than Poincaré; Mc- 
Donald perhaps better than Baldwin; some things pos- 
sibly better than stability and silence in the White House; 
nothing better, possibly, than Branting in Sweden. That 
is to say, the problem is at bottom that of developing liberal 
governments, with public opinion and public will behind 
them. ) 

The law of nations shall be founded on a federation of 
free states. (This is not so much a condition of the goal as 
the goal itself, a universally free society under law.) 

One final question. What positive influence has Kant’s 
doctrine exerted in the direction of perpetual peace? TJ 


KANT CONCERNING PERPETUAL PEACE jaa 


have had no means of tracing its influence with any exact- 
ness. Some of you may know of data on this point. One 
result I think is clear. Kant at least gave the idea recog- 
nized respectability. I know of no earlier effort of this 
kind that was taken seriously. The careful and earnest 
work of the Abbé St. Pierre, for example, was universally 
laughed at. It was the fashion to call all such schemes 
visionary. But Kant was not laughed at. He placed his 
proposals upon so solid an intellectual foundation and put 
into them so shrewd a common sense as to compel acknowl- 
edgment of them within the field of serious discussion. 
Within a quarter of a century after these little books ap- 
peared a real effort, though a futile one, was made to estab- 
lish a warless Europe. Now, after another hundred years, 
the project has again become supremely urgent, and men 
are striving, singularly close both to Kant’s spirit and his 
method, toward his historic goal of perpetual peace. 


J. F. CRAWFORD. 
BELo1T COLLEGE. 


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THE Sources AND EFFECTS IN ENGLAND OF KANT’S PHILOSOPHY 
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THE SOURCES AND EFFECTS IN ENGLAND OF 
KANT SSP HILOSOPHY*OFY BEAUTY 


E HAVE all heard, perhaps rather too often, that 

it was Hume who awoke Kant from dogmatic slum- 
ber. It sometimes seems the chief claim to distinction of 
our chief English philosopher that he was in revenge anni- 
hilated by the German; if annihilation it can be called, to 
re-christen a “fiction of the mind” as “empirically real but 
transcendentally ideal,” or to substitute the postulates of 
the moral reason for probability as the guide of life. It 
is a weakness of all scholars, shared by philosophers, to 
emphasize our corrections of predecessors rather than our 
debts to them. If some carpers have thought that what 
Kant did to Hume’s epistemology was to systematize 
rather than to annihilate, there would be more truth in 
holding that Kant’s philosophy of beauty owes nearly 
everything but its systematic form to English writers. His 
debt to Baumgarten, who had inaugurated German aes- 
thetics in 1750, is less. 

Kant’s pre-critical treatise Beobachtungen tiber das 
Gefiihl des Schonen und Erhabenen of 1764 is a very dull 
performance, which makes such classifications as that men 
are sublime and women beautiful, the English character 
sublime and the French beautiful. It has only two claims 
to remembrance: one that it was about the first of his 
works translated into French, and the other that it con- 
tains the endearing concession Die Coquetterie an einer 
sonst artigen Person ist vielleicht tadelhaft, aber doch 
schon.” There are, however, striking resemblances to 


180 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


Home’s (Lord Kames) Elements of Criticism which had 
just been translated into German and reviewed, perhaps 
(Schlapp thinks) by Kant himself, in the Kénigsberger 
gelehrten und politischen Zeitungen. 

The serious business begins in 1790 with Die Kritik der 
Urtheilskraft. Meanwhile Burke’s Enquiry into the Sub- 
lime and Beautiful, published in 1756, had been translated 
into German in 1773. Addison’s papers from The Spec- 
tator were already translated in 1745. 

In such a paper as this I can only in the briefest out- 
line attempt to recall the salient features of Kant’s theory.’ 
His great merit is that he attacks the problem in its most 
essential and most difficult form. Previous writers—crit- 
ics and littérateurs rather than philosophers—had talked 
about the masterpieces of painting and poetry, and it had 
seemed plausible to suppose with Sidney, with Boileau, 
with Dryden, that they in some way instructed or elevated 
us, and that at least one of their merits was truth to nature 
whether individual or typical or ideal. 

Kant brushes all this loose stuff aside and goes state 
to the point. He sees that there is a beauty of form which 
imitates nothing, teaches us nothing about things and sat- 
isfies neither desire nor the moral law—we have no inter- 
est in the object’s existence. This he explains as a feel- 
ing that in apprehending certain forms (i. e., spatial pat- 
terns or arrangements of sounds) our faculties of appre- 
hension are set in a harmonious play without any guid- 
ing concept as to what the object ought to be. The object 
then seems to be designed, but designed for no purpose 
except our apprehension; it exhibits Zweckmdssigkeit ohne 
Zweck. This feeling of free harmony between our appre- 
hensive powers we demand should be shared by all men. 
It cannot be demonstrated, since no concept of the thing’s 


1] have attempted to deal less inadequately both with Kant’s general view 
and with the concept of sublimity in The Theory of Beauty, Metheun (Lon- 
don), 2nd edit., 1923. Authorities are there cited. 





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EFFECTS IN ENGLAND OF KANT’S PHILOSOPHY £31 


nature or purpose is involved; but only so far as we are 
certain that our feeling can be shared do we have the 
proper aesthetic satisfaction, which is no sensuous, subjec- 
tive pleasure (like the pleasure in a pure tone or color), 
but a delight in the uncovenanted mercy that not only in 
thought, as we expected, but in apprehension are we one 
spirit. 

Such is the central thought of Kant’s aesthetic. Before 
proceeding to criticize or to appreciate it we may notice 
that Home in his last chapter says that there is a rule for 
taste though a “subjective” one, so that, though there is 
no disputing, yet there is good and bad taste. Kant uses 
almost the same words ($§8, 17, 20). Hutcheson, one of 
Kant’s favorite authors, in his Enquiry into the Original of 
our Ideas of Beauty (1725, translated 1762) had said that 
we speak of a sense of beauty because it is immediate and 
necessary and springs from no intellectual principle though 
it is quite distinct from interest. Its simplest principle is 
unity in variety. We cannot argue from this regularity 
of form to a designing cause, yet the fact that any sense 
for beauty should, out of the infinite possibilities, find an 
appropriate object, does suggest the idea of design. Accord- 
ingly he distinguishes the beautiful from the good, the 
useful and the perfect. Addison in his papers on the imagi- 
nation in The Spectator (411, et seq.) ascribes beauty to 
“anything that hath such a variety or regularity as may 
seem the effect of Design in what we call works of 
Chance.” This he thinks gives us a pleasure of imagina- 
tion “not so gross as that of Sense nor so refined as that 
of Understanding.” ‘We immediately assent to the beauty 
of an object without enquiring into the particular causes 
or occasions of it.” 

So far then there is little that is original in Kant. True, 
he has made such good use of his borrowings as to acquire 
a prescriptive right in them, though it would have been 


182 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


convenient if, contrary to the custom of his day, he had 
cited their source. But not all that he borrows is of equal 
value. Ifa theory of beauty is'to have any value, it must 
as Socrates taught us in the Hippias Major, hold good of 
all beauties and not only of some. Kant finds that his 
formula is not plausibly applicable to beauties other than 
those of pure form, and therefore, following the usual 
method of philosophers, denies that they are really beauties 
at all. He distinguishes the beauty of pure or abstract 
form, which he believes he has explained and which he 
calls free beauty (pulchritudo vaga), from (a) the beauty 
of all organic forms (and of architecture), which consists 
merely in adaptation to purpose, and from (b) the beauty 
of art, which consists in good imitation. In both of these 
there is a concept or ideal to be satisfied and so we get only 
pulchritudo adhaerens, or dependent beauty. Home had 
distinguished beauty proper, which consists in “regular- 
ity, uniformity, proportion, order, simplicity” from rela- 
tive beauty which supposes consideration of an end (ch. 
IIT). Hutcheson had distinguished pure beauty from the 
relative beauty which consists in good imitation. So once 
more Kant seems to have borrowed, and here perhaps in- 
dependence would have been the best policy. In his own 
day these sources, and others like them, would be so 
familiar to most readers that to acknowledge them specifi- 
cally, even had it been the custom of the time, would be 
unnecessary. But, now that they are too often forgotten, 
we are in danger of crediting Kant with an originality in 
error which he does not deserve. 

For surely this is all quite false. The beauty of paint- 
ing and poetry does not consist in their skillful imitation. 
Nor does the beauty of organic forms consist in their adap- 
tation for life-preserving functions. Nor is the beauty of 
either essentially different from that of arabesque. Kant’s 
own instances are sufficient to condemn him. He tells us 


EFFECTS IN ENGLAND OF KANT’S PHILOSOPHY 183 


(§48) that in calling a woman’s form beautiful we simply 
mean that in it nature represents the purposes of a woman’s 
form. This is no more true than that we find other ani- 
mals beautiful in proportion to their fitness to survive or 
churches in proportion to their acoustic convenience. 

To what a pass have the holders of such a theory brought 
themselves! The only pure beauty, that is the only beauty 
which their theory even professes to explain, is the beauty 
of natural arabesques, for instance ripple-marks in sand 
and water or possibly cloud-patterns (with abstraction 
from what Kant calls the “merely sensuous richness of 
color”) and natural sound-patterns, if there be any, which 
do not depend on the “‘merely sensuous richness of notes.” 
The instances he himself gives of flowers, birds, sea-shells, 
are manifestly illegitimate as being organic. Yet it 1s 
clear that nobody would ever think of sand-ripples or even 
of clouds in a dull grey sky as typical instances of beauty. 
And, so far, our theorists would have to hold that anything 
more exciting is mere approval of clever imitation or of 
apt adaptation or else a sensuous titillation of the optic or 
aural nerves. But there was a way out; a way which Kant 
adopted, though, perhaps to his credit, he did not invent. 
Besides the beautiful there is the sublime. The sublime 1s 
explained as the exact opposite of the beautiful. In the 
most characteristic aesthetic experiences, far from merely 
noting a certain easy working of his perceptive mechanism, 
man is overwhelmed and carried away by something 
stronger than himself; like Socrates he is fjttwv tv xaABV. 
Kant himself, as we know, felt for the starry heavens an 
awe and reverence only comparable with that which he 
felt for the moral law; and surely that could not be just 
because the points of light were so disposed in a dark back- 
ground as to make apprehension easy. Nor could it even 
be because the ease of his apprehension was universal to 
mankind For so would be the difficulty of apprehending 


184 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


anything in a fog—which would really be a good instance 
of what Kant thinks happens in sublimity. 


He ascribes sublimity to those objects which gratify us 
by their very formlessness, their very repugnance to our 
faculties, their check to our vital powers (§23). And we 
may well ask how this can be. Kant thinks in two ways. 
The “mathematically sublime’ is found in objects which 
by their vast size or by the iteration of uniform features 
suggest infinity as their only standard of measurement. So 
in the very act of violating all our faculties of perception 
they remind us of a super-sensuous faculty, reason, which 
is not inadequate for an aspiration to infinity itself. Such 
sublimity, Kant says, is found in nature alone; so I often 
wondered why the only instances he gives of it are St. 
Peter’s and the pyramids, until I noticed that these are 
two instances of sublimity given by Home. 

The “dynamically sublime” is not a great object but a 
great force, and it stimulates us to bethink ourselves not 
of a faculty adequate to estimating infinite force but of 
that moral faculty, by which we could be just though the 
heavens should fall. Yet we only appreciate it when we 
are not actually in danger. 

Treating of sublimity Kant quotes Burke’s essay, from 
which he distinguishes his own view as less physiological, 
but does not mention other predecessors. Burke said that 
“what is in any sort terrible is sublime but our safety is 
a condition of our pleasure in it.” Natural sublimity causes 
a sort of astonishment in the soul, when all its motions are 
suspended with some degree of horror.” He goes on to 
say that it need not be great, but that vagueness or vast- 
ness can be sublime by suggesting the terrors of infinity 
and eternity, and that it can be suggested by iteration of 
the uniform parts in an object. But for Burke nothing is 
so sublime as the power of God. 


EFFECTS IN ENGLAND OF KANT’S PHILOSOPHY 185 


One of the main differences of this from Kant is that the 
latter makes the sublimity which depends not on force or 
terror but on size into a distinct kind. It is noteworthy 
that a spirited controversy was going on in England as 
to whether the sublime consisted in terror, as thought by 
Burke, or in size. Home had said that the heightening 
or enlarging of beauty produces a new emotion called sub- 
limity or grandeur and instanced the passage quoted by 
“Longinus” where Moses, “no ordinary man,” records that 
God said, “Let there be light’? and there was light. Here, 
says Home, emotion of sublimity “is merely a flash which 
vanishing immediately, gives way to humility and venera- 
tion.” Hugh Blair in his third lecture on Rhetoric (1783) 
says that the “Sublime . . . produces a sort of internal 
elevation and expansion. . . . The emotion is certainly 
delightful, but altogether of the serious kind; a degree 
of awfulness and solemnity, even approaching to severity. 

. All vastness produces the impression of sublimity. 
Hence infinite space, endless numbers and eternal dura- 
tion fill the mind with great ideas. . . . But many objects 
appear sublime which have no relation to space at all... . 
Great power and strength exerted, always raise sublime 
ideas.’ This recognition of the two kinds is exactly Kant’s. 

But, after all, these English writers mostly carry back 
to Addison, and it matters little whether Kant derived 
from him through them, through Bodmer and Breitinger, 
or direct. In the essays on the imagination, Addison 
thought that this faculty is pleased with three kinds of 
object, the Great, the Uncommon and the Beautiful. His 
account of the beautiful has already been summarized. Of 
the Great he instances Wide Champains, Deserts, Moun- 
tains, for “Our Imagination loves to be filled with an object 
or to grasp at anything that is too big for its capacity.” The 
result is “a delightful stillness and amazement of the soul. 
. . . The mind of man naturally hates anything that looks 


186 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


like a restraint upon it.” And like Kant after him he in- 
stances the starry heavens, and suggests that the final 
cause of such pleasures is that we may find our complete 
satisfaction in God only. For sublimity is to be found 
rather in nature than in art, though ancient architecture 
“strikes in with the natural greatness of the soul.” There 
is one parallel where the resemblances of thought, diction 
and illustration are so close that they could scarcely be the 
result of coincidence. Addison says in his tenth essay that 
nothing is so pleasing to our Imagination as to enlarge 
itself by degrees, comparing the body of a man succes- 
sively to the earth, the sun, the solar-system, space; for 
the understanding opens infinite spaces to us, but Imagi- 
nation soon comes to a stand... . “This defect of Imagina- 
tion may not be in the soul itself, but as it acts in conjunc- 
tion with the body.” Kant says (§26): “A tree, whose 
height we measure with reference to the height of a man, 
at all events gives a standard for a mountain; and if this 
were a mile high it would serve as a unit for the number 
expressive of the earth’s diameter so that the latter might 
be made intuitable. The earth’s diameter would supply a 
unit for the known planetary system and this for the milky 
way and so on ad infinitum.” All is Addison’s except the 
style. For the rest, the only common source of which I 
am aware is the De Sublinitate, and the resemblances of 
Kant to Addison are much greater than those of either 
to that.” I venture to think that Kant’s opposition between 
sublimity and beauty is as ill-founded as that between in- 
organic natural form on the one hand and art with organic 
nature on the other. This I have argued in the work 
already cited. Our present point is the genesis of the dis- 
tinction. 


2 The recent researches of Professor J. G. Robertson of the University of 
London (The Genesis of Romantic Criticism, Cambridge, 1923) show a greater 
effect of the Italians, especially Muratori, upon Bodmer than I had suspected. 
He agrees however that their influence upon Addison was probably not consid- 
erable. He does not consider Home or Kant 


EFFECTS IN ENGLAND OF KANT’S PHILOSOPHY Le 


There are then few original ideas in Kant’s aesthetic. 
He has systematized and hardened distinctions and oppo- 
sitions current in English for the preceding eighty years, 
and this exaggeration results in a reductio ad absurdum., 
Yet in thus carrying to their logical extreme the tendencies 
of his time he seemed to meet its needs. His distinction 
between beauty and sublimity was taken up by philoso- 
phers, Hegel in chief and after him a host of Germans, and 
also by poets and critics: Schiller, Goethe, Coleridge and 
Wordsworth. So that if the opposition is false we must 
at least account for its success. 

It isa platitude that art cannot stand still. Artists either 
imitate their predecessors and elaborate traditional themes 
with stock mannerisms—and then we speak of a period of 
decay—or they discover new themes and new technical 
methods, and then we speak, according to our years, of 
development or of anarchy. The inventors of such new 
beauty naturally enough, in their enthusiasm, decry the 
old as dull and ugly—because its stale repetition would 
be so. The critics and philosophers listen to them, at least 
so far as to accept the view that here must be two quite 
different kinds of beauty: the old and familiar, which, be- 
cause they understand and appreciate it, seems amenable to 
the old definition, and a new one, whose strangeness half at- 
tracts, half irritates and wholly puzzles them, and for 
which they think a new definition must be sought. Pos- 
sibly the De Sublimitate owes its distinction between a 
grandeur to be found in wild nature or in sublime poetry 
and the less troubling perfection of typical Attic art toa 
phase of this kind. Whenever it could have been written 
there may already have been some early premonition of 
the radical change from what we should call classical to 
what Riegl calls Late Roman Art. Certainly the renais- 
sance produced in Scaliger, Elizabethan poetry its apolo- 
gists in Sidney and Samuel Daniel, the romantic revival 


188 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


its defenders in Coleridge, Wordsworth and Shelley. But 
the revival of romance had begun already with Addison, 
who is one of the first to use the term eulogistically and 
with just our own meaning. For in 1712 he calls “finely 
Romantick’”’ Milton’s account of Thammuz: 


“Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured 
The Syrian damsels to lament his fate, 
In am’rous ditties all a summer day, 
While smooth Adonis from his native rock 
Ran purple to the Sea, supposed with Blood 
Of Thammuz yearly wounded: the love tale 
Infected Sion’s daughters with like lust, 
Whose wanton passions in the sacred Porch 
Ezekiel saw.” 


and immediately he goes on to give as an instance of sub- 
limity, Milton’s: 


“Millions of flaming swords drawn from the thighs 
Of mighty Cherubim; the sudden blaze 
Far round illumined Hell.” 


All through the rest of the eighteenth century was waged 
this contest of Romantic Sublimity versus Classical Beauty, 
between this new terrifying beauty of wildness, monstros- 
ity and violence and the old beauty, familiar and tamed, 
of regularity, smoothness, attraction. 

Who was likely to feel the antithesis so sharply as Kant? 
He was born in 1724, just after the death of Addison and 
just before the birth of Cowper, about the time of Voltaire’s 
visit to England. He grew up under the francophil régime 
of Frederick the Great, who was the disciple of Voltaire 
and whose rationalistic and correct French verse Kant 
quotes. He practically never left Koenigsberg and never 
saw a great mountain or, I suppose, a great original work 
of architecture, sculpture or painting. He wrote the 


EFFECTS IN ENGLAND OF KANT’S PHILOSOPHY 189 


Kritik der Urtheilskraft in 1790 when he was sixty-six, 
eight years after the publication of Rousseau’s Confessions, 
and in the year of Wordsworth’s tour through revolu- 
tionary France to Switzerland, of Turner’s first exhibition 
in the Royal Academy, and of the first publication of 
Goethe’s Faust, when Gotz, Werther and much of Schil- 
ler’s work were already well known. 

How could a man living in such an epoch and with such 
a training be anything but stupefied by the collision of the 
traditional beauties of his boyhood with those which jostled 
their way into the astonished presence of his age? The 
books which he quotes for illustrations of the sublime are 
Voyages Dans les Alpes, by De Saussure and Lettres sur 
Egypte, by Savary; both on countries as different as pos- 
sible from East Prussia. His own instances are mountains, 
boiling cataracts, overhanging and threatening precipices; 
none of which could he ever have seen. He also mentions 
tempests and raging seas. As he lived twenty miles from 
the Baltic, it is just possible, in spite of his notoriously 
sedentary habits, that he may have seen a storm at sea. 
His sense of gene, then, in dealing with the new literature 
and the new taste in “horrid” scenery is, I think, easily 
accounted for. He owed his ideas of beauty to the polite 
polished, rationalistic poetry of France. He owed his 
ideas of sublimity to English writers fed on Shakespeare 
and Milton. Naturally, he instances, as I have noted, the 
French character as beautiful, the English as sublime. 

It was by Kant that this dim feeling of change, of revolu- 
tion indeed, in poetic method and in taste for scenery, 
which had been stirring in the European and especially 
the English mind ever since Addison, was brought to acute 
self-consciousness in Coleridge and Wordsworth. Cole- 
ridge in his impressionable youth read Kant and seemed 
to find there the philosophic justification of a hostility he 
was himself feeling between the older rules or habits of 


190 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


taste and his own poetic impulse. He communicated his 
discovery to Wordsworth, and they both in their critical 
writings adopted the Kantian phraseology for a contrast 
which they might perhaps have found just as well ex- 
pressed in the less technical but more sensitive words of 
Addison. Had they gone back to the fountain-head, they 
would have felt the continuity of development more and 
seen that in fulfilling the old prophets they had no need 
to stone them. The England of Pope and Dryden had 
always loved Milton and Shakespeare; so romance and 
sublimity were no such innovation in her poetry as they 
might seem to a German philosopher of French culture. 

“My mind,” writes Coleridge to Thelwall in 1797, 
“aches to know something one, great and indivisible. Only 
in faith of that do rocks, waterfalls, mountains or caverns 
give the sense of sublimity. But in this faith all things 
counterfeit infinity.” And in his marginal notes on a copy 
of Herder’s Kalligone, he expressly refers this formula to 
Kant. Wordsworth in The Recluse, echoes Kant, as he 
no doubt heard him quoted by Coleridge: 


“Stern was the face of nature; we rejoiced 
In that stern countenance, for our souls thence drew 
A feeling of their strength.” 


and his sister Dorothy gets even closer to the original when 
describing in her Journal the Falls of Reichenbach. 

I do not feel all this to be a matter of merely antiquarian 
interest, for it seems to me that the same sort of thing 
is happening today. There have recently been some re- 
markable innovations in pictorial technique, mainly in the 
direction of a revolt from naturalism to formalism, as the 
poetry of Kant’s day revolted from formalism to natural- 
ism. And corresponding to the rediscovery of wild scen- 
ery in his time are the archaeological researches and dis- 
coveries of our own. Now the art-critics and historians 


EFFECTS IN ENGLAND OF KANT’S PHILOSOPHY 191 


and archaeologists who reflect on these new movements 
and new discoveries are really in a position analogous to 
that of Kant, but as it were reversed. He found a new 
art and a new taste in nature, which neglected the formali- 
ties and smoothness of his youth and yearned after the 
wildness and mystery of passion, of deserts, of mountains 
and of stars. Today Riegl, Wolfllin, Worringer, Roger 
Fry and Hulme find a new art and a new arch- 
eology which reveal a stylized beauty in the unlife- 
like, the geometrical, the unworldly. And it is the undying 
merit of Kant that he laid his finger on this eternal dialec- 
tic of beauty, this constant swing of the pendulum between 
form and content, pattern and passion. Like him, our 
contemporary critics find a popular philosophy—in their 
case the psychology of the Eimfiihling school—applicable 
enough to the art of their fathers but inadequate to their 
own. Like him they make the error of concluding that 
there must be two philosophies, one for the old, another 
for the new. Yet if the old philosophy be really inade- 
quate it must be abandoned for a better, since a philosophy 
of beauty which only explains some beauties stands con- 
demned. Nor have they Kant’s excuse. In his day no 
acceptable philosophy of art existed and it was not his fault 
if he could not invent one. Today there is a philosophy of 
art which, if not ultimate, is competent to cover what 
beauty may be in the art of Cézanne, of Gauguin, of the 
Cubists, of the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Minoans 
and the Byzantines. Instead of telling us, as Lipps did, 
that aesthetic experience is feeling our life in the life of 
the object—which did well enough for naturalistic and 
nature-loving art but not at all for formal and pessimistic 
religious art—Croce tells us that beauty is always and 
only the expression in sensible imagery of an individual 
emotion, of every movement of attraction or repulsion in 
the human spirit. 


192 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


It is probably to Kant even more than to Hegel himself 
that Croce would acknowledge a debt. Kant with an un- 
erring insight for fundamental problems first made clear 
that beauty is not truth nor morality nor sensation; that 
taste has its purity which is yet subjective. And with 
unsurpassed acumen he discriminated the two factors of 
all beauty—form and matter, expression and feeling; 
though he made the mistake of treating them not as ele- 
ments in every beauty but as two kinds of beauty, or rather 
as beauty proper, which was pure form, and sublimity, 
which was purely formless feeling, unexpressed and unem- 
bodied, merely suggested to our minds by such formless and 
(he himself says) disgusting objects as a stormy sea. He 
should have bethought himself that form without feeling 
is empty, and feeling not expressed in form is blind. 


E. F. Carrirt. 


FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD. 
Visiting Professor at the State University of Michigan. 


Kant’s CopERNICAN REVOLUTION 


Wiikey RE Sh) 
owt nam a Leora 


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fv UL ge Se GA coe 





KANT’S COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 


T THE close of the Middle Ages realism and nominal- 

ism were contending for the throne of philosophy. 
Although the leaders of the new era proudly set their faces 
against the past and insisted on the complete reconstruc- 
tion of philosophical thought, the old issues reappeared 
under new names, and when the young Kant entered upon 
the scene he found the battle raging between rationalism 
and empiricism. He sided at first with the Leibnizian- 
Wolffian host, which had gained the supremacy in the 
German universities; and it may be said that in a certain 
sense he remained true to his first love all his life long. But 
his was not the mind to be lulled to sleep by a metaphysical 
system, and we can see how his thought developed, slowly 
and laboriously, by dint of hard intellectual labor. In his 
second period we note in him a growing scepticism with 
regard to the current rationalistic proofs for the existence 
of God, the unity of the world, and the substantiality of 
the soul. His study of English empiricism doubtless exer- 
cised an influence upon his thinking in these matters, but 
it must not be forgotten that he was a mathematician and 
physicist and a student of Newton; it is easy to imagine 
the attitude of a mind grounded in science toward the 


uncritical method of the dogmatic systems.’ At any rate, 


1It must be kept in mind that Kant was well versed in the study of mathe- 
matics and the natural sciences, that he taught mathematics and physics, and 
anthropology and physical geography, that his first work (1747) was 
a discussion of the notion of force, in which he tried to show the superiority 
of the dynamic view over the current mechanical theory. As early as 1755 
he published his book, Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, in which 
he propounded what is now called the nebular hypothesis or the Kant-Lapla- 
cian theory, a work which appeared forty-one years before the celebrated 
treatise of the Frenchman Laplace (Exposition du systéme du monde). His 


196 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


he became thoroughly dissatisfied with both the leading 
schools and looked upon their contentions as vain. It is 
apparent from Kant’s Critique that this dissatisfaction 
was widespread even in his own country, and that it was 
particularly marked with respect to dogmatic metaphysics 
as represented in Germany. He tells us in the prefaces to 
the first and second editions of the Critique of Pure Reason’ 
that the one-time almighty and revered queen of all the 
sciences is now, like Hecuba, despised and 'deserted— 
“with none so poor to do her reverence.”’ Under the ad- 
ministration of the dogmatists, he goes on to say, her reign 
had been despotic, but it has now gradually degenerated, 
through internal wars, into complete anarchy; and the 
sceptics, a type of nomads, who have a contempt for any 
steady cultivation of the soil, are disturbing the civil union 
from time to time. He seems to be especially irritated by 
the behavior of metaphysics, evidently because her plan 
of campaign appeared to him such an utterly hopeless one. 


Kant once said that it was his fate to be in love with 
metaphysics, and perhaps this is the reason why he cen- 
sures her conduct so unsparingly. In metaphysics, he de- 
clares, reason constantly comes to a dead stop, even when 
it attempts to understand a priori those laws which the 
commonest experience confirms. Metaphysics is a field 
for exercising one’s powers in sham battles, a terrain 
upon which never a single combatant has been able to gain 
even the slightest ground. And why has metaphysics 
never succeeded in discovering a sure road to Wissen- 


doctor’s thesis bore the title Mcditationum quarundam de igne succincta deline- 
atio, 1755. Helmholtz declared that by inclination, endowment, and preference 
Kant was a natural scientist. Adickes in his new book, Kant als Naturwis- 
senschaftler, holds that “he was and remained all his life long a dilettante in 
natural-scientific matters, indeed an extremely well-informed and mathemati- 
cally trained dilettante, but yet when all is said a mere dilettante.” Neverthe- 
less, it cannot be denied that he was a philosopher of nature whose whole 
point of view and method was greatly influenced by his scientific studies. 

? The passages quoted in this article are, for the most part, taken from 
these prefaces. Occasional use has been made of Max Miiller’s translation 
of the Critique. 








IMMANUEL KANT ON His DAILY WALK 


(A Recent Drawing by Heinrich Wolff ) 


KANT’S COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 197 


schaft? Why has nature visited upon our reason the rest- 
less striving to find this path as one of the most important 
concerns of life? We have little cause to trust our reason 
if it not only deserts us in one of the most important phases 
of our desire for knowledge but cajoles us with vain hopes 
and in the end defrauds us. 

Against the sciences of his time Kant has no such indict- 
ment to bring: indeed, they are not shallow, they even 
surpass their former reputation of thoroughness. He re- 
gards his age as the real age of criticism, and he insists 
that everything must submit to criticism, even religion and 
legislation, for these cannot gain universal respect unless 
they are subjected to the free and public examination of 
reason. 

Rationalistic metaphysics is not the only target of Kant’s 
shafts. The Lockean empiricism, too, he is convinced, has 
turned out to be a failure. It once seemed, he says, that 
a certain “physiology” of the human understanding had 
made an end of all this anarchy, and decided the question 
of the legitimacy of the claims of knowledge. But, he 
asserts, its pedigree has proved to be fictitious, and the old 
dogmatism and contempt for Wissenschaft have returned. 
Kant knew perfectly well that English empiricism had 
ended in bankruptcy in Hume’s scepticism. Hume had 
aroused him from his dogmatic slumbers and taught him 
that all dogmatism—the procedure of pure reason without 
previous criticism—was impossible, whether it appeared 
in the heavy a priori cloak of rationalism or in the light 
psychological dress of empiricism. We may say that Locke 
had shut up man with his own ideas, and that Hume 
had walled up the windows of his prison, leav- 
ing him alone with his “impressions” and_ their 
faint ideas, confined to the task of bringing some slight 
order into “the heap or collection of ideas’ called the 
mind. The soul had been analyzed away; there was noth- 


198 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


ing left of the whole world but ideas, each one “distinct 
and different and distinguishable” from every other one. 
Knowledge of matters of fact was limited to this atomic 
world of mind—at best a mere probability and a guide to 
practice, but not real knowledge. In Hume the theory of 
knowledge came to the conclusion that there was no knowl- 
edge: rational theology, rational cosmology, and rational 
psychology were found to be pseudo-sciences dealing with 
things about which one can know nothing at all or with 
things which can nowhere exist. Reason had examined 
itself out of existence; in its eagerness to discover its roots 
it had sapped its own life. 

That was the situation of philosophy as Kant saw it at 
close range. “And so today,” he says, “we have indiffer- 
ence, the mother of chaos and night in the sciences.” 
This indifference, however, he adds, is not the result of 
frivolity; it is a challenge to reason to take up anew the 
most difficult of all concerns, namely, self-knowledge, and 
to establish a tribunal which shall secure to reason its just 
claims. He never doubted for a moment that there was an 
a priori element in mathematics and physics—the two 
great sciences of his age—that both yielded universal and 
necessary knowledge. To discredit them seemed to him 
a fantastic enterprise, and yet he was sure that rational- 
ism, no less than empiricism, was following a false trail. 
And though he uttered a plague on both their philosophi- 
cal houses, he saw elements of truth in each. He has been 
called the Alles-Zermalmer, the All-Destroyer, but noth- 
ing was farther from his thought than wholesale destruc- 
tion. Hume, indeed, had lived by the sword and had perished 
by the sword. It is true, Kant came to destroy the preten- 
tions of pseudo-knowledge, but that was only the begin- 
ning of his task—a task which the Scotch sceptic had, in 
part, already performed for him. As a matter of fact, he 
came not to destroy but to fulfill. All previous attempts at 


KANT’S COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 199 


constructing metaphysics, he informs us, were failures, but 
we should not let the difficulties and obstacles that lie in 
our path here frighten us. The Critique was to be “the 
necessary preparation in support of a thoroughly scientific 
system of metaphysics”; it was to show not only what we 
cannot know but what we can know. We must not for- 
get that the Alles-Zermalmer also wrote the Prolegomena 
zu einer jeden kiinftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissen- 
schaft wird auftreten kénnen, the Metaphysische Anfangs- 
griinde der Naturwissenschaft, Zur Grundlegung der 
Metaphystk der Sitten, and the Metaphysik der Sitten, in 
order to illustrate possible and legitimate types of meta- 
physics. He called this much-abused member of the philo- 
sophical family “the fairest child of reason”; she was “the 
real and true philosophy.” In his work On the Progress 
of Metaphysics since Leibniz and Wolff, he says: “The 
transcendental philosophy has for its object the founding 
of a metaphysic, whose purpose, as the chief end of pure 
reason, is intended to lead reason beyond the limits of the 
sensible world to the field of the supersensible.” The very 
name of metaphysics, he reminds us, suggests this func- 
tion. What alone the Critique did destroy, he himself 
points out, were the roots of materialism, atheism, fatal- 
ism, free-thinking, disbelief, the extravagances of fancy, 
superstition, and also (subjective) idealism and scepticism. 

There is another point to be emphasized in this connec- 
tion. The Critique is by no means opposed even to the 
dogmatic procedure of reason in pure knowledge as Wis- 
senschaft. Such a procedure, he says, must always be 
dogmatic; indeed, we must not forget that the Critique 
itself is dogmatic in this sense; it has absolute faith in the 
power of reason to reason about itself. Pure science must 
strictly demonstrate its judgments by sure a priori princi- 
ples; but it is opposed to dogmatism, that is, to the pre- 
sumption that we can get along solely with a pure knowl- 


200 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


edge of concepts according to principles without in- 
quiry into the manner and the authority by which reason 
has arrived at such a pot. Dogmatism is the dogmatic 
procedure of pure reason without a previous criticism of 
its Own power. 

All this does not betray the temper of the iconoclast: 
the man who declared that he had to destroy knowledge— 
that is, pseudo-knowledge—in order to leave room for 
faith, was not an Alles-Zermalmer. And the history of 
the great philosophical movement of which he was the in- 
tellectual father is a living argument against the theory 
that he came to destroy and not to fulfill. It has been said 
by a recent German writer that Kant had removed the 
ovaries of metaphysics, and that the one-time queen has 
been barren ever since. Against this view we have only 
to call to mind that never in the history of thought, since 
Socrates, has a philosophy shown such fertility in produc- 
ing metaphysical systems as that fathered by Kant. It 
may be true that some of the children are illegitimate, but 
that would not prove the barrenness of metaphysics, but 
only that she had gone astray. 

As was said before, Kant held mathematics and physics 
in high respect; in them we reach a measure of genuine 
knowledge. The question now arises: to what do these 
sciences owe their prestige and success? Even among the 
Egyptians, mathematics, for example, was still groping in 
the dark. How did it happen, Kant asks, that this science 
became what it is: incontestable knowledge? The answer 
to this question gave him his clue and led to what seemed 
a complete change of standpoint, a thorough-going revo- 
lution in the field of philosophy. The happy thought of a 
single individual, he says, brought about a revolution in 
mathematics; for the first man who demonstrated the prop- 
erties of the isosceles triangle saw a new light (dem ging 
ein Licht auf). From that moment on, the sure course of 


KANT’S COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 201 


a science was marked out and prescribed for all time and 
in infinite directions. For this pathfinder discovered that 
his task was not to trace out (nachzuspiiren) what he saw 
in the figure or even to examine the pure notion of the tri- 
angle in order to deduce from it the properties of the same. 
No, a new light flashed upon him; his happy thought was a 
creative thought: it consisted in creating such a figure, and 
then drawing out of it the necessary implications of his 
own thought. “He saw that he had to produce (by con- 
struction) what he had himself, aceording to concepts 
a priori, placed into that figure and represented in it, so 
that in order to know anything with certainty a priori, he 
must not attribute to that figure anything beyond what 
necessarily follows from what he has himself placed into 
it, in accordance with the concept.” And so, too, when 
Galileo let balls of a particular weight, which he had deter- 
mined himself, roll down an inclined plane, or Torricelli 
made the air carry a weight, which he had previously de- 
termined to be equal to that of a definite volume of water, 
a new light flashed on all students of nature. They under- 
stood that reason had insight only into what she herself 
produces according to her own plan, and that she must 
move forward (vorangehen) with the principles of her 
judgments, according to a fixed law, and compel nature to 
answer her questions, but not let herself be led by nature, 
as it were, in leading strings. For ctherwise, observa- 
tions which are made accidentally and not according to a 
prearranged plan will not form any necessary connection 
according to law—which is the very thing reason seeks 
and requires. Reason must approach nature with its prin- 
ciples in one hand and experiment in the other—the exper- 
iment thought out by reason in accordance with these prin- 
ciples. That is, unless we approach nature with such prin- 
ciples, we shall not be able to find her laws. We must 
know what we are looking for, we must have some 


202 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


hypothesis, otherwise we shall not find anything. Pasteur 
did not accidentally stumble upon his germ-theory by a hap- 
hazard observation of diseases. He did not discover the 
cause of anthrax until he had an idea of what to look for. 
Columbus started out on his westward journey guided by 
a theory: he did not wander around upon the ocean in hap- 
hazard fashion, hoping, like Micawber, for something to 
turn up (Micawber, by the way, never did find anything), 
but made straight for India, as he thought. The discoy- 
ery of the West Indies was an accident—but his theory 
was true nonetheless, for he was on his way to India. 

It is true, Kant says, reason must be instructed by nature 
but not as if reason were a pupil that lets his teacher (nat- 
ure) tell him whatever she pleases, but as if reason were an 
appointed judge who compels the witnesses to answer the 
questions which he himself puts to them. And so, “even 
the science of physics entirely owes the beneficial revolu- 
tion in its character to the happy thought that we ought 
to seek in nature (and not fictitiously to ascribe to it) what- 
ever reason must learn from nature, and could not know 
by itself, and that we must do this i accordance with what 
reason itself has placed into nature. Thus only has the 
study of nature entered on the secure method of a science, 
after having for centuries done nothing but grope in the 
dark.” 

A revolution made mathematics and natural science 
what they now are. It was a similar happy thought when 
Copernicus, contrary to common experience, assumed the 
spectator to be turning round and the stars to be at rest. 
This was only an hypothesis but it was made a certainty 
by the discovery of the laws of motion which determine 
the movements of the heavenly bodies. Indeed, it was on 
the Copernican assumption that Kepler proceeded in his 
investigations and verified the hypothesis. With the dis- 
covery of the law of gravitation by Newton—another 


KANT’S COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 203 


happy thought, Kant might have added—these laws them- 
selves were subsumed under an all-embracing principle. 
This force would have forever remained undiscovered, if 
Copernicus had not dared to seek the observed move- 
ments, not in the heavenly bodies but in the spectator. 

Kant was thoroughly convinced that he himself had 
brought about a similar revolution in metaphysics: that on 
him, too, a new light had flashed. Just as Copernicus im- 
agines the spectator moving and the stars at rest, so Kant 
tries the experiment, in metaphysics, of presupposing that, 
in the perceiving of objects, it is the objects that conform 
to perception and not perception that conforms to the 
objects. 

The ordinary view is that our mind passively receives 
the objects, that what we call our sense-experience, for 
example, is something forced upon us from without. If 
this is so, then we can know nothing of the world of objects 
a priori, we can make no universal and necessary judg- 
ments concerning them; we are simply dependent upon the 
impressions which we receive from without. Let us, how- 
ever, imagine that the object (as the object of the senses) 
conforms to the nature of our faculty of perception, that 
what we call our experience is something dependent on 
our own minds, something already fashioned, organized, 
by the mind according to the mind’s laws: then we can 
have an a priori knowledge of what we experience. Know- 
ing the nature of the mind, the universal and necessary 
a priori forms of the mind, we can know its products, the 
world of our experience. And we may go further: in 
order that our perceptions may become cognitions, the sub- 
ject must relate them (as Vorstellungen, ideas) to some- 
thing as the object of these ideas, and determine this object 
by means of these ideas. I can assume that the objects, or, 
which is the same, the experiences in which they are known 
(as given objects) conform to the concept. Copernicus 


204 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


placed the sun in the center of the planetary system; Kant 
enthroned mind in the center of the system of knowledge. 

This “happy thought” leads to important results. Expe- 
rience is already a mode of knowing which requires Ver- 
stand; it is organized according to the structure of the 
mind. For that reason we can know a priori our world of 
experience; to know, to understand, means just this organ- 
izing. It is a rational experience because we ourselves 
have rationalized it. This explains the universality and 
necessity in our experience. Mathematics is universal and 
necessary knowledge because it is a creation of the mind, 
of the perceiving and understanding mind—the revelation 
of the mind’s own functioning. And so we understand 
only what the mind does: the mind understands only itself. 
We understand space-, time-, and causal relations because 
the mind relates things spatially, temporally, and causally. 
Experience itself is in this sense the work of an organizing 
mind. Without a relating mind there could be no experi- 
ence whatever: without an identifying, comparing, dis- 
criminating, synthetizing mind, there could be neither 
experience nor scientific knowledge of it. Synthetic knowl- 
edge a priori of nature is possible only on the presupposi- 
tion that consciousness is itself synthetic; and that the syn- 
thetic nature of consciousness cannot be grounded in the 
“stuff” but only in the form (that is, in the laws of syn- 
thesis).° Geometry as synthetic knowledge a priori is pos- 
sible on the assumption that consciousness is in its very 
nature synthetic. To Kant pure experience would be no 
experience at all. Mere staring at the world would not be 
perceiving. An experience that is not understood at all, 
not even understood as strange and baffling, would not be 
a fact of experience, whatever else it might be. A mind 
that merely registered sensations would be like a photo- 
graphic plate, that is, mindless, knowledge-less. The quest 


$8 See Karl Groos, Der Aufbau der Systeme, pp. 83ff. 


KANT’S COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 205 


for a pure experience is a quest for intellectual blindness 
and death. If the finder did nothing but recognize it as 
a pure experience, he would still be interpreting it, and it 
would no longer be pure. 

Whatever events we may become aware of, we shall 
always identify and differentiate, call the same and differ- 
ent, hold together in concepts, arrange in a space and time 
order, connect as substance and accident, cause and effect, 
or in the relation of reciprocal action. We shall always 
conceive them in their all-ness, some-ness, and one-ness, 
affirm and deny something of them, and we shall always 
pronounce our judgments in the form of apodictic, categor- 
ical, or possible statements. To know means to place every- 
thing in an order which the perceiving and thinking mind 
creates. Whatever happens, be it only a whim, an illusion, 
an hallucination, a dream, a fancy, will find its place in a 
setting. 

Kant reminds us that the Critique of Pure Reason is a 
treatise of the method and not a system of science itself. 
Nevertheless, it outlines the entire scope of the system of 
science, both with regard to its limits as well as with re- 
gard to its entire inner structure. Pure speculative reason 
can and must appraise its own power, and it can also enu- 
merate completely the manifold ways of presenting the 
problems themselves. For nothing can be added to the ob- 
jects in a priort knowledge except what the thinking subject 
draws out of itself. Moreover, the speculative reason is a 
wholly abstracted isolated unity so far as its principles are 
concerned, a self-existent unity, in which every member 
exists for the sake of all the others and all the others for 
the sake of the one, as in an organism; and no principle can 
with certainty be taken in one relation but must at the 
same time be examined in its complete relation to the entire 


pure use of reason. 


206 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


Metaphysics is thus brought to the sure road of science 
by the Critique. Since it has only to do with principles 
and the limitations of their use, it can embrace the whole 
field of knowledge and complete its work, offering to pos- 
terity a stock of knowledge which can never be increased. 
Metaphysics is the only one of the sciences which may prom- 
ise itself such completion. Nothing is left to posterity but 
to arrange everything in a didactic way, according to its 
purposes, without increasing the content at all. For it is 
nothing but the inventory of all our possessions, acquired 
through pure reason systematically ordered. Nothing can 
escape us here, because what reason draws wholly out of 
itself cannot be concealed, for it is simply brought to light 
by reason as soon as we have discovered the common prin- 
ciple of reason. If anything remains to be done, Kant 
boldly asserts, nothing has been done. 

Kant had the sublime faith that he had opened the road 
to knowledge, that he had discovered the sure path to Wis- 
senschaft for which reason has been seeking but groping 
in the dark. All the errors are now at an end which have 
divided reason against itself in its experiential use. His 
Copernican revolution has enabled him to specify all the 
problems according to principles; he has at last discovered 
the cause of reason’s misunderstanding of itself. It is true, 
he goes on to say, the answers have not turned out as the 
dogmatists’ extravagant desire for knowledge may have 
expected, for only magic could have satisfied this desire, 
and these arts, he confesses, he does not possess. The duty 
of philosophy was to abolish the phantom which sprang 
from misconceptions. He defends himself against the 
charge of immodesty, pointing out that his claims are more 
modest than those of every program-maker who assever- 
ates that he has demonstrated the simple nature of the soul 
and the necessity of a first beginning of the universe. Such 
things, he admits, are beyond his powers, for he has only 


KANT’S COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 207 


to do with reason itself and its pure thinking; and the 
complete knowledge of pure thinking he finds in himself. 
Yes, even the commonest logic offers an example “that 
all its simple acts may be completely and systematically 
enumerated”: only, in the Critique the question is raised, 
How much can I do with all this “if all the matter and help 
of experience are taken away from me?” The main ques- 
tion is, What and how can the pure understanding itself 
know, independent of all experience; and not: How is the 
power to think itself possible? We see how thoroughly the 
rationalistic ideal has permeated his whole mode of 
thought, and how profound was his faith in the organic 
structure of thought. If Kant had stopped at this point, 
we should have had the following result. Our ordinary 
scientific knowledge is, so far as its form is concerned, the 
creation of the intellect: it prescribes its laws to nature 
instead of being determined by nature. We learn from 
experience because we have read into experience the forms 
and categories of the mind. This kind of knowledge is 
limited entirely to experience: it is knowledge based on 
perception, and it is valid knowledge because it tells us no 
more about experience than we have put into it. And from 
the principles which we have discovered we can develop 
a great system of knowledge, an interrelated logical whole, 
in which every legitimate problem and every legitimate 
solution will find its appointed place; and we can also fix 
the limits beyond which this kind of knowledge cannot go, 
indeed, even describe all the fallacies to which it is sub- 
ject. If we had time, we could complete this work so that 
future generations would find nothing more to do in this 
field. But Kant does not stop here. Complete though such 
a system of knowledge would be, it would tell us nothing 
whatever of the real world, of the things as they really 
are in themselves, for the perceiving mind cannot pierce 
the veil of experience and penetrate to the world which 


208 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


is behind that. Science will always be restricted to the 
experienced-phenomenal world—beyond this there is no 
thoroughfare for it. We have, however, the right to spec- 
ulate about what lies behind the veil, to think. Human 
reason is not exhausted in the work of the understanding: 
it can rise above the empirical, the physical, to the trans- 
physical, to the metaphysical. 

Kant points out the advantages of this theory for phil- 
osophy. On the assumption that there is no distinction be- 
tween thing's as objects of experience and things as things 
in themselves, we are forced to accept a mechanistic mate- 
rialism. We could not say that the will is free (as a thing- 
in-itself) and at the same time determined (when con- 
ceived in time and space), for that would be a logical con- 
tradiction. If the soul is a thing, there is no possibility 
of saving its freedom. But if the Critique is true, the prin- 
ciple of causality has validity only in our perceived world, 
in the world of experience, and things spiritual are not 
subject to its law, but are spiritually discerned. The Crit- 
ique has shown that freedom is thinkable. Morality pre- 
supposes responsibility, freedom; and there is no contra- 
diction: freedom does not prevent the same act from being 
a part of the natural mechanism, which, remember, is only 
the way in which we organize our experience. Indeed, 
Kant says, I cannot even asswme the existence of God, 
freedom, and immortality for practical use, unless I take 
away from speculative reason its presumption to extrava- 
gant knowledge. “Hence I had to destroy knowledge to 
have room for faith, for the dogmatism of metaphysics, 
that is, the prejudice that it can get along without the 
Critique of Pure Reason is the source of all disbelief which 
contradicts morality—a disbelief that is always quite dog- 
matic.” ‘Some sort of metaphysics there has always been 
in the world and will most likely continue to be, and also 
a dialectic of pure reason, because the latter is natural to 


KANT’S COPERNICAN REVOLUTION 209 


it. It is therefore the first and most important concern of 
philosophy to remove every harmful influence of metaphys- 
ics once and for all by stopping up the source of errors.” 


Kant repudiated dogmatic metaphysics, uncritical meta- 
physics, all metaphysics that attempts to solve the problem 
of ultimate reality without previous examination of the 
power of reason. The traditional metaphysics offers itself 
as knowledge of the understanding that is demonstrable 
a priori. Wecan have such knowledge only in physics and 
mathematics; we can know a priori only the forms and 
categories of our perceived world. We cannot look for 
God and the soul in nature: they are not objects of experi- 
ence among other objects, phenomena in the space, time, 
causal order. We can, therefore, have no such a priori 
knowledge of God, the cosmos, the soul, as the old meta- 
physics professes to have. Rational theology, rational cos- 
mology, and rational psychology are in that sense pseudo- 
sciences. But to know as we know in physics, to know 
phenomena, is not the sole function of the mind. “To 
think an object and to know an object are not the same 
thing.” * We can only think real reality, we cannot per- 
ceive it, intuit it. The real world is an intelligible world, 
a transphysical or metaphysical world, a world which can- 
not be “understood” but only “thought,” but which is 
nevertheless real and true. Theoretical reason leads us 


to such an ideal world: beyond the phenomenal world it 
seeks the Unconditioned. Ideas create objects for them- 
selves whose material is not taken from experience. 


4“To know an object I must be able to prove its possibility (be it accord- 
ing to the testimony of experience from its reality, or a priori by reason). 
But I can think what I will so long as I do not contradict myself, so long as 
my concept is a possible thought, although I cannot guarantee that in the 
totality of all possibilities an object corresponds to it. However, in order to 
attribute objective validity to it (real possibility, for the former was merely 
logical), more is demanded; but this “more” need not be sought in theoretical 
sources of knowledge: it can also lie in practical sources.” Otherwise, the 
absurd proposition would follow that appearance is without something that 
appears. (Preface to the second edition of the Critique, Erdmann’s ed., p. 15.) 


210 IMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1924 


In other words, we can know in another sense of the 
term knowing. We have already seen that pure reason 
can know itself: the Critique of Pure Reason is the auto- 
biography of reason. Die Geisterwelt 1st nicht verschlos- 
sen, dein Sinn ist zu, dem Herz ist todt. The Geist thinks 
and writes the Critique. Moreover, this same reason, as 
practical (moral) reason, reveals the moral law, which 
can nowhere be found in scientific experience or validated 
by scientific principles; the moral law is the deliverance 
of reason; one might call it a creative act. Here we are 
in the world of pure reason, to which neither the forms of 
space and time nor the categories of science, substance and 
accident, cause and effect, apply. It would be absurd to 
speak of reason, of thought, as thick or thin, light or heavy, 
three-dimensional, as an attribute of the brain, or as an 
effect of the grouping of moving electrons: it does not exist 
as a thing, and hence the qualities and relations that be- 
long to things cannot be applied to it. Kant was so fear- 
ful of making an-entity, a substance, a thing, of the ego 
that he left it hanging in thin air in the Critique of Pure 
Reason. It is the keystone of his theory of knowledge, the 
vehicle of all concepts in general, the seat of its categories, 
the tie that binds. 

Kant repudiated only the metaphysics of dogmatism, 
pseudo-metaphysics. Indeed, his aim was to establish met- 
aphysics, to raise it from its previous condition of insecur- 
ity to the rank of Wissenschaft. The greatest obstacle in 
his path was materialism, and this he removed by his doc- 
trine of phenomenalism. His transcendental dialectic de- 
stroyed the rational psychology, the rational cosmology, 
and the rational theology of the school, whose fallacies and 
contradictions had undermined our confidence in reason. 
His goal was the mundus intelligibilis. He regarded noth- 
ing more certain than that reality is at bottom an ideal 
teleological order, which has existence for thought— 


KANT’S COPERNICAN REVOLUTION OA NG | 


Dasein fiir das Denken—but cannot be grasped by the Ver- 
stand or be made anschaulich to perception. “We could 
not understand it (the thing-in-itself) even if some one 
should tell us what it is.” Kant laid the foundations of 
objective idealism upon which his successors built their 
imposing structures. They brought the Geist which Kant 
left hanging in the heavens, where Plato, too, had put it, 
down to earth, and gave it work to do in the world. Schell- 
ing found its traces in nature: the principle which reveals 
itself in human thinking is not a stranger in the universe. 
Hegel sees it in the evolution of human history and human 
institutions: surely a field in which one might expect mind 
to manifest itself. And both these thinkers agreed with 
Kant that the natural-scientific method could not do jus- 
tice to reality as it really is, that it stands helpless before 
the portals of the kingdom of the mind. The new light 
which flashed on Kant has cast its rays over nearly two 
hundred years of philosophical history, and we have still to 
reckon with it even if it be only to prove it a will-o-the wisp. 


FRANK THILLY. 
CORNELL UNIVERSITY. 








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